Roasted vegetable and potato salad with smoked salmon

If you had the good fortune to acquire a huge smoked salmon fillet, what would you do with it? My first instinct was to slice it up and eat it over the cutting board with my fingers. That would have been okay if I were eating alone, but since I wasn’t, I felt obliged to make something more coherent. A dig through the fridge revealed potatoes, peppers, asparagus and cherry tomatoes. Voila: Roasted vegetable and potato salad with smoked salmon.

I roasted a cup of cherry tomatoes, a couple of garlic cloves and two yellow and orange peppers, cut into strips, at 430 for about 25 minutes, then added a pound or so of trimmed asparagus to the pan for another 10 minutes of roasting. In the meantime, I parboiled two potatoes and sliced up some—ok, a lot--of smoked salmon into chunks.

I let the vegetables cool a little when they were done; then I cut the asparagus into 1-inch pieces, peeled and cubed the potatoes and combined everything in a salad bowl. For the dressing, I mixed the soft, roasted garlic with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, a tablespoon of olive oil, and some kosher salt and black pepper. The salad was great, and I regret only that I didn’t have any parsley, scallions or goat/feta cheese on hand to make it downright fantastic.