For all our big talk on food and wanting to try new things, we always seem to make the same dish whenever we cook salmon. Now don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy the Lemon and Dill salmon with yogurt sauce, but I’ve been itching to try something new lately.

So as was perusing the latest issue of Food and Wine I came across a dish that I thought sounded pretty fantastic. The ironic part? It was an ad. But the recipe was interesting, so I gave it a shot. Here’s some of how we did it, and I’ll walk you through some of the things that we did a little different…and what I’d do differently next time.

Lets start with the ingredients, you’ll need (the way we made it):
1 to 2 cups of orange juice
olive oil
2 teaspoons of dried Thyme
Salmon filets (this recipe should take care of 6 to 8 6oz filets)
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
1 tablespoon Smoke Spanish Paprika
1 teaspoon Cinnamon (I prefer freshly grated/ground)
1 teaspoon of Orange zest, grated
1/2 teaspoon of salt

This starts off pretty easy, mix up the orange juice, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and the thyme. Then put the salmon in a glass dish and pour this marinade over the top. Cover it and toss it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Then, you’re going to pre-heat the oven to 400 and mix the rest of the ingredients together (minus the salmon, just relax, that part is coming). Once you’ve got all the this well and integrated put the salmon on your pan. When we use foil on a baking sheet, especially with the oil and orange juice we don’t need to grease it. But if you’re worried about it sticking…go for it. Mmmm, doesn’t this look tasty! Its not even cooked yet!

Then you’re going to take the rub and spread it evenly on the top side of your salmon. If you’re a doofus like me you’ll spread the rub on too thick. In retrospect I shouldn’t have put as much of the rub on here….not like I was smoking ribs or something….but thats for another post. Spread it evenly and you’re almost on the home stretch.

You’ll let it sit in the oven for 10 or 15 minutes, until it flakes with a fork. While its in the oven you could be finishing up some rice (as we had) and you could also be making some yummy greens to go along with it. For us, we put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large saute pan and a small pat of butter and heated the pan. Once it got nice and hot, we tossed in some garlic and sauted it for just a minute or two, then put in a large bunch of spinach. We kept moving the spinach around and stirring it until it was wilted, which happened about the same time that the salmon came out of the oven looking like this.

Personally I really really liked the taste of this dish and it was super easy to prepare and took less than an hour from start to finish including the marinading. Chris…not so much a fan. Again, I think this might be because I put TOO much rub on the salmon and the rub got kind of sticky instead of crisping up / caramelizing the way I was expecting. But definitely something I’ll be making again (if only a single serving.)