SALMON WITH ORANGE-CHILI HOLLANDAISE SAUCE

This was truly an amazing hollandaise sauce. It came together is a very interesting way. Our Food Matters Project recipe for this week was chosen by Sandra of Meadows Cooks. Sandra chose Mark Bittman's recipe for Japanese Spiced Roasted Beets. The recipe has you make a blend of pepper, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, orange zest and chili powder. You toss it with roasted beets or as Mark suggests, parsnips, potatoes, or squash. I made the spice blend but I didn't have "chili powder" in the traditional blend you find in markets but I did have California Chili Powder. I'm not sure what kind of chili was used but my blend was really spicy! I couldn't see it working with vegetables. It was spicy but had a great orange taste from the zest. I had planned on serving it on potatoes but I knew it wasn't going to taste good and I was serving it with a beautiful piece of baked salmon. So I went into rescue mode and I kept thinking about hollandaise. This blend was screaming "add me to hollandaise sauce". So I did and my husband declared this the best sauce I have ever made! In keeping with our healthy way of eating I only put a schmear of hollandaise on the side but let's just say... his was swimming in it.

I winged this recipe but here is what I did. Sliced orange under the salmon, coated the salmon with olive oil, salt and pepper and topped the salmon with sliced orange.

Baked in a 350~ oven for 20 minutes.

I made my fool proof hollandaise recipe which is Julia Childs recipe and you can find it here. Instead of adding the cayenne pepper I added a tablespoon of the spice blend here, 2 tablespoons orange juice and 1 tablespoon lemon juice.

This was (as I said) a rescue, if any of our members have leftover spice blend I highly recommend adding it to hollandaise. If you just want an amazing hollandaise sauce skip the blend and just add orange zest, orange juice, lemon juice and real chili powder or 1 pureed chipotle.