Salmon in Creamy Sauce with Home Made Pappardelle

I haven't made pasta for a while, and thought I'd better make some for the big salmon portions we bought from the newly openned Woolies in Richmond.  They are really fresh and I'd like to do some creamy sauce pasta.

Partially reminded by last Friday night's Master Class, of the Kiddie Masterchef show.

Pappardelles are great with ragus, but I also like the rustic taste of it for the creamy salmon.

This is really easy to make, the portions here will make 2 mains or 4 entrées.  Children friendly.

2 x 250g skin less bone less fresh Atlantic salmon portions
200ml cream
olive oil
10-12 capers
1.5 cup fish stock
1 tbsp plain flour
1 knob of butter
handful of fresh herbs, parsley, oregano, mint.
Olive oil.
Cracked black pepper
Ground white pepper
1 tbsp white wine
Salt to season
dash of Lemon juice
1 tbsp of dijon mustard.

For the dough:
2 large eggs, 59g
200g pasta flour
dash of olive oil.

My children like the whole egg pasta, so I haven't been playing with adding other vegies or herbs into the dough.  Simple combine the ingredients, form the dough, set for rest for an hour or so wrapped up, and pass through the trust worthy pasta maker.  The 10 year old boy was a bit grumpy at the time, so he got offerred to do the pasta machine. (certainly turned his mood around and he was very proud of himself, he always think he is a bit of a cook, well, that's what he thinks.)  For Pappardelles, I didn't make the sheets really thin, like I'd normally do with linguini, so the thickness I decided was 2 on the dial.  And we fold up the sheets after patted it with flour, and cut them into 1.5cms wide stripes, left them hanging up...

And then we turned to the salmon portions.  It's simple. Just cracked pepper and sea salt flakes, and pan fried gently in olive oil.  I added a dash of lemon juice before taking the salmon out for resting.

I used the same pan, added the knob of butter, added the flour to make the roux, and then just used the cream and fish stock for a simple white sauce.  Added white pepper, finely diced capers and white wine and made sure the sauce is the consistancy I wanted.


Mean while, roughly break the salmon up in chunks and return them to the white sauce, only for less than 1 minute maybe? Just to coat them with white sauce.

Ah, I did made the pot of salted water to boil my pasta at the mean time as well... the fresh pasta didn't take too long to cook normally and we usually just drain the pasta and add more olive oil before plating.

I didn't use the fresh herbs on the children's plates (we didn't want to have big portions at dinner time as we wanted to lose some weight before summer comes - got one month to go!  And we decided entrée size serves are enough for dinners these days) but did manage to load our plates up with herbs from the garden (I'm very glad that they are doing fine, however for some weird reason, I can't seem to find basil this year so basil has been missing from my garden).

I was very happy to see the children finishing their plates, as normally Luke won't tough creamy sauce pasta - guess he made them, he had to show every one he did a great job!