Garlicky Paprika Salmon steak / Dolphin Emotions
Today’s post is about fishes :-). Most restaurants in Portugal offer assortments of freshly grilled fishes. Fresh fish taste much better compared to frozen ones and feels light when you take a bite… After getting used to this in Portugal, I was looking at options of buying fresh fishes back in Germany. One day when I went for shopping to buy some chicken for our Sunday menu, I saw this fresh beautiful steak in fish counter. Hurray, I decided to change our Sunday menu. What other fish is better suited for grilling than Salmon!. This Omega-3 rich Salmon fish  is our family favorite.  Be it grilled or in a spicy tamarind gravy or fried or steamed it tastes yummy.  Coming from an Indian background, I tend to use a bit more of spices and chilli, especially for the fish grill. Beware my European friends!.  Dont worry :), this recipe is to let you enjoy the spicy version without burning your tongue. So those who dont like lot of hot chilli powder in their fish, this is for you. I just replaced chilli powder with red paprika powder which is labelled as hot but it is not as hot as medium hot chilli powder. Adding paprika powder gives bright red color and good chilli flavor. So I spiced it up with little minced garlic, paprika , turmeric, crushed pepper. The accompaniment is creamed spinach, Lemon rice and carrot.
Recipe of Grilled Salmon
Ingredients:
- Fresh Salmon steaks – 3 ( for 3 persons)
- Paprika powder – 2 Tbsp (sweet paprika)
- Turmeric – 1/2 tsp
- Garlic minced – 1tsp
- Salt – as per taste
- Oil  – few Tbsp
- Pepper crushed – 1tsp (optional)
Method:
1. Wash the Salmon steak. Add some turmeric, salt, garlic, pepper,paprika powder and 2Tbsp of oil into a bowl . Apply this mix on the steaks. Let it rest for 1/2 an hour.
2. Heat a flat pan and add a spoon of oil. Now add the fish to the hot pan and cook for 5 min on each in medium flame.
3. Once done squeeze some lemon juice on top and enjoy.
Dolphin Emotions in Portugal
Our Portugal expedition continues in this post as well…
Riya’s primary school group name was Dolphins and since then she was super excited to meet this beautiful animal in real. First time when we visited Portugal, we stayed in Lagos. It is an old town with narrow cobbled streets. Some streets are narrow that even a person cannot walk on the side when the car is on its way. There is an old church and the town has got some good restaurants and lot of souvenir shops. Lagos is also a point where lot of ferries operate which takes you to wild dolphins watching in sea or a casual boat trip or caves trip. The boat takes you deep into the ocean for Dolphin watching where the depth of the sea runs few kilometers. Weather has to be sunny and warm for the dolphins to come out and sign of seagulls being there is an indicator for dolphins in that area. One should be lucky to see these intelligent animal in this ride. Our planned day of visit happened to be a cloudy day (around end of April ). Even after we were 15kms into sea we could not see them. With lot of disappointment, we promised ourselves that we will meet them in our next visit.
On our next visit to Portugal, we didn’t want to check our luck in wild sea but rather looking for other options. The one we had was watching Dolphin show in Zoomarine in Algarve. It is a water theme park which also has quite a number of Dolphins, sea animals & birds. It had one of the amazing Dolphin Shows. If you want more intimate (dont get wild!) sessions with Dolphins you can go for a special program called Dolphin emotions. It is a bit expensive but worth the experience for lifetime. We planned to be there on Riya’s birthday. After cutting her Birthday cake, we started to ZooMarine. We booked for a Dolphin Emotions program for Riya as her bday present. She was quiet excited that she can swim together with dolphins . She & her group went in to the large pool of water with bottlenose Dolphins swimming happily and we could see her from distance. Â In this program, she had some informative session followed by commanding the Dolphins to do to some spins etc..The best part was also a ride on back of Dolphin by holding its fin. Even after a year now she is excited and remembers the fun she had. By the way this the only place in Europe where such lively interactions with dolphins is possible. Google for Dolphin Emotions and you can find more details…