Carrot top pesto with roast vegetables and salmon part 2

Once I'd made the pesto recipe from yesterday, I had to work out what to put with it. Salmon was already on the menu, I obviously had carrots available and we'd also picked courgettes that day. Recently harvested had been garlic and charlotte potatoes. So as you can see, this recipe was starting to make great use of seasonally abundant ingredients. 

Pesto goes well with salmon but is also a nice dressing for potato salad. This has a robust earthy taste, with crunchy sweet orange and yellow roots, floral stripey courgettes, browned potatoes, flaky, fresh pink salmon and vivid green pesto. The colours are so brilliant, you could almost paint a picture with them. It's not a perfectly preened restaurant platter, but good, honest homegrown food. 

Roast salmon & vegetables ingredients

This recipe makes enough to serve 4 for a main meal. The quantities are approximate, round them up or down according to what you have.

Carrot top pesto

4 salmon fillet portions of about 150g each, skinned & pin boned
1.5kg of charlotte or other waxy salad potatoes cut into bite-sized chunks
250g carrots, ideally of different colours
250g courgettes
Extra virgin olive oil
1/2 lemon or lime
Salt & freshly ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 220ºC.

Put the potato chunks on a baking tray, coat with a little olive oil and season with salt & pepper. Roast in the oven for about 20 minutes until tender and slightly browned. Take out and leave them in a large bowl you'll use to mix everything together.

Cut the courgettes into thin ribbons length ways with a vegetable peeler or mandolin and chop the carrots into 2-3cm batons. Put the carrots and courgettes in a bowl, pour over a lug of olive oil, squeeze over the juice of your lemon or lime and season with salt & pepper. Give the vegetables a good mix together with your hands to make sure they are well coated with the marinade.

Slide the courgette and carrot mix onto a baking tray and rest the salmon fillets on top. Roast in the oven for 10 minutes until the salmon flakes easily.

Put the salmon and vegetables into the bowl with the potatoes. Gently stir in enough of your carrot top pesto to coat the fish & vegetable nicely. Spoon onto plates or bowls and tuck in. 

Carl Legge lives on the Llyn Peninsula in Wales on a permaculture smallholding and writes a regular blog full of delicious recipes and more. He is currently writing The Permaculture Kitchen, a book of seasonal, local, home-grown delicious recipes for Permanent Publications, the book publishing arm of Permaculture magazine. It will be available in the autumn.