Simple Baked Salmon with Butter and Dill

There's a smell that comes from a foil parcel when you open it at the table. Butter, dill, lemon, and the clean sweetness of good fish, all released in one warm breath. It fills the kitchen in a way that feels disproportionate to the effort involved. Ten minutes of preparation. Twenty minutes in the oven. A midweek supper that asks almost nothing of you and gives back more than it should.

This is the meal I cook when I want to eat well but can't face thinking about it. A piece of salmon, a generous knob of butter, some dill from the garden if it's there, a squeeze of lemon. Wrap it in foil. Put it in the oven. Set the table while it cooks. The parcel does the work, trapping the butter and the steam together so the fish poaches gently in its own small envelope of flavour. You don't need to watch it. You don't need to turn it. You barely need to think about it.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: salmon, butter, dill, Tuesday. It's been Tuesday's answer more times than I can count. The fish should be good, properly fresh, the kind that smells of the sea rather than the fridge. If the dill is from the garden, so much the better. If it's from a bunch at the supermarket, that works too. We're only making dinner.