Grilled salmon, cucumber-avocado relish, roasted carrots & onions

If you asked my 6-year old son what his favorite food is, there's a good possibility that he will reply with "fish!" My soon-to-be 4-year old daughter is not quite as enthusiastic but won't completely turn her nose at it. Well, sometimes. Going to the market together to buy the fish always helps to build the anticipation for a fish dinner. Often, we'll let our son pick out what kind of fish to have. He usually gravitates toward the whole fish. He likes the "fish with the face!" Yes, it's strange, I know. But, I think it's great that he's so excited about eating something so healthy. He will even request that the cooked head be on his plate. Yes, that's even stranger, I know. This time around, we went with Coho salmon. It looked really great at the store and tasted wonderful as well.

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Roasted cauliflower, chicken cutlets, cucumber-tomato salad

If you saw this plate of food, you would say that it's a chicken dish with a couple of sides. Technically, you'd be correct. However, I wanted to focus more on one of the sides. I wanted to talk about cauliflower. Specifically, roasted cauliflower. I like cauliflower well enough. It wouldn't crack my top ten vegetable list. But when you roast it and let it caramelize, and concentrate the flavor by letting it wilt down, it becomes one of the tastiest foods, vegetable or otherwise. So, it's by design that the cauliflower is front-and-center in my photo.

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Grilled soy-marinated chicken

Sorry for the short hiatus at tony's kitchen! I was away on vacation and had a wonderful time with the fam! However, the downside of vacation was the desolate culinary landscape of, what Bourdain likes to call, TGI-McFunsters-type restaurants. So I was itching to get back into the kitchen and make something simple, fresh and delicious. I wanted to cook up something really flavorful but I also didn't want it to be too complicated. I also wanted to grill! I decided to look toward the Asian kitchen for inspiration. I wanted to do a Korean-bbq-style marinated steak at first but I had a bunch of boneless, skinless chicken thighs in the freezer. So I decided to go with that and marinate in Korean-bbq flavors.

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