Tapenade Crusted Salmon

Last week with the holiday was a series of relatively simple dishes.  This first one was really easy and nice mid-week dish if you are so inclined.  Tapenade is simply an olive paste and this dish takes a salmon filet, puts an olive crust on the flesh side and then you pan fry it.  That's it. 

The tapenade included nicoise olives, olive oil, anchovies, pine nuts and garlic.  That's the most complicated thing about this entire dish.  I took all of the ingredients and took them for a spin in the food processor which completed the paste.

  

Now I'll grant you a piece of salmon that beautiful probably didn't deserve to be treated this way it probably would have been much better served at a sushi bar.

I took the tapenade out of the boil and then pressed it on to the flesh side of the filet while the pan heated up.

The flesh side when into the oil that was put in a non-stick skillet, I flipped it after just a few minutes and let the oil do its work on the skin side.

The final plate.  After I cut into the meat I realized that I probably had the oil too hot as the crust was crispy but the fish was still basically raw on the inside.  Thankfully, I'm not one that gets too upset by that.