Baked salmon is simply delicious, no matter what ingredients you decide to accompany your fish with. If you’re already asking yourself how is salmon healthy and why does it get featured on a healthy eating recipes website, then it’s my pleasure to tell you that salmon is not only highly nutritious, but also rich in protein and good fats such as the Omega 3 oil that helps preventing coronary heart disease. Salmon is also an important source of vitamin D, which is an essential nutrient that contributes to our health and well-being. Latest alternative medicine trends favor discovering and treating causes of conditions rather than their symptoms, and this is how we got to the concept of functional medicine which is based on the theory that most chronic conditions occur as a follow of internal inflammation in our body, therefore healing that inflammation would automatically lead to the disappearance of the chronic ailment that gives us those symptoms. Specialists in functional medicine conduct research that proved vitamin D to play a major role in reducing the internal inflammation. As salmon provides a high vitamin D intake, it’s included on the healthy foods list of many medical doctors and nutritionists who follow this approach of functional medicine.

Back to our healthy salmon recipe, this is how I cook it:

Ingredients:

• 1 salmon fillet, approx. 1 1/2 inch thick, 1 pound weight, fresh, with skin
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 5-6 black olives, whole
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 5-6 allspice berries (or some fine herbs which you like most)
• Salt, pepper
• Lemon

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Serves: 3-4 people

Method:

Preheat the oven at 400 F. Put the olive oil in a baking dish, then add the fish fillet over it. Turn the fish on all sides, so it gets covered with a thin oil layer all over, then leave it with the skin up. Spread the minced garlic, the olives and the allspice berries in the baking dish, then add some salt and about one cup of water. Put the dish in the oven and bake the salmon at 400 F for about 10 minutes. You can cover it, but it’s OK even if you don’t. After the 10 minutes passed (you’ll know it even if you forget to check on the time, because your whole house it’s going to start smelling like baked garlic), take the dish out of the oven and turn the salmon fillet with the other side up. Let the fish bake for 10-15 minutes more at lower temperature.

Serve it sprinkled with freshly ground black pepper and with freshly squeezed lemon juice. Decorate the plates with 3-4 lemon slices. Wild rice, sauted vegetables or baked potatoes with parsley make excellent side dishes for baked salmon.

Greek salad can be served as a main dish or as a side dish for a meat-based meal and it’s very popular in the Greek cuisine. Based mainly on fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, diced feta cheese, and olives, the Greek salad can also contain other ingredients such as bell peppers, pickles, capers or even beets in some areas of the world. The typical dressing is olive oil, but also vinegar, herbs and other seasonings are used in many Greek salad recipes.

In any of its variants, Greek salad is a healthy food, mainly because of the tomatoes. Tomatoes have a high Vitamin C content, as well as Vitamin A, Potassium and Iron, which are necessary elements in a well-balanced diet. Yet, the best part in tomatoes is the pigment that gives them the red color, which is called lycopene and which is an extremely powerful antioxidant. Another main ingredient in this healthy salad are the olives. Olives are extremely rich in Iron, Vitamin E and dietary fiber. They also have a high content of monounsaturated fats, which act as a protective shield for the human body cells, thus lowering the inflammation risk. When the monounsaturated fats combine themselves with Vitamin E, as in olives, the effect is an enhanced protection and a better action against free radicals, which are amongst our biggest enemies because they cause oxidation processes which are harmful for the body.