Roasted wild salmon with ripe mango and peaches

Fresh, wild-caught sockeye salmon from the Copper River in Alaska -- $14.99 a pound at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack -- roasted with ripe fruit and fresh garden herbs. An off note was a side dish of excessively oily Quinoa with Basil Pesto, left.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

When I finally found fresh wild Alaskan sockeye salmon at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack this week, we had one ripe mango and several ripe peaches left.

Roasting this wonderful salmon with ripe fruit, fresh herbs and lime juice is easy and yields a sweet-and-savory dinner.

I started by slicing the fruit, placing it on parchment paper in a large roasting pan, adding fresh lime juice and dusting the mango and peach sections with Ground Saigon Cinnamon from Costco.

The fruit roasted for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees while I prepared the 1.74-pound salmon fillet.

I cut the deep red-orange fish into five pieces, seasoning them with salt, lime juice, Aleppo pepper and chopped fresh mint and oregano from my garden.

I took the pan out of the oven, added the salmon and roasted the fish for 10 to 12 minutes.

The Costco label recommends cooking wild salmon to an internal temperature of 145 degrees, and I may try that next time after pulling out one of the five pieces early and finding it too rare in the center.

Unfortunately, I ruined my first wild sockeye salmon dinner of the season by eating several spoonfuls of Del Destino-brand Quinoa with Basil Pesto from Peru as a side dish.

I liked the way the quinoa-pesto blend tasted, but was turned off by an excessive amount of oil.

I continued to taste the quinoa and pesto long after I finished my meal.

From a communist country to a Costco near you

Costco Wholesale's Kirkland Signature Ground Saigon Cinnamon label is superimposed on a map of Vietnam, a communist country. A run-on sentence with a typo describes the cinnamon trees and the "unmatched" sweet-hot flavor of the cinnamon.

 

I've been using Costco Wholesale's Ground Saigon Cinnamon for years, and love the special flavor it gives to homemade lattes, hot cereal and salt-free roasted almonds.

I also buy Costco's farmed Black Tiger Shrimp from Vietnam, a communist country, and I know that schools of farmed, catfish-like basa fillet land on U.S. shores every year.

I don't really have a problem with Costco selling food from a communist country.

But I wish Costco and other U.S. retailers would sell products from another communist government, the one on the island of Cuba.

The trade embargo imposed on Cuba in the Kennedy administration means any U.S. company that tries to sell island products faces big financial penalties.

And customs officials likely would confiscate and destroy any Cuban products brought home by American tourists returning from the Caribbean's biggest island.

Cuba is known for its wonderful rum, but also produces excellent coffee, and it's the only place I know where you can find 100% mango juice in grocery stores.

Americans buy fresh, wild-caught red snapper from South America, but are denied Cuban pargo, lobster and other seafood.