Over the past 24 hours we’ve been through many different potential menus for the weekend. The main driver for this was that we couldn’t find the ingredients for our first choices, but I think we still over-thought it quite a bit. In the end we settled on breaded fish for this evening and shuffled and re-organised everything else around it.
We bought two tilapia fillets and some oven chips (I know – cheating – but we don’t have a deep fat fryer yet) and tried our hand at making our own tartare sauce. The tilapia turned out rather well, but the tartare sauce didn’t emulsify properly and was too runny but still tasted good (if a little like capery salad dressing). We ate some steamed brocolli with this, which also went well with the pseudo-tartare sauce.
As we made up the fish recipe as we went along, this is an approximation:
Ingredients:
2 tilapia fillets
4 tbsp plain flour
1 tsp paprika
salt and pepper
1 cup fresh bread crumbs (these are easy to make by putting bits of white bread into a food processor)
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp vegetable oil
10g butter
Method:
Mix the paprika into the flour, then season with salt and pepper. Put onto a plate (this needs a lot of plates…). Pour the beaten egg onto a second plate. Spread the breadcrumbs out on a third plate. Then dust the fish fillets quite generously with the flour. When that is done, dip them into the beaten egg and finally coat them in the breadcrumbs.
When they are both breaded, heat up a frying pan to medium heat. When the frying pan is hot, add the oil and the butter and when the butter has melted, add the fish. Cook for 4 minutes on each side, then serve.
Bah – there’s nothing to be ashamed of with oven chips! I don’t like heating up a wok full of oil to deep fry some chips just for me, especially now I have an open plan flat and I don’t want the whole place to smell like a chippy…
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I agree with Lizzie – nowt wrong with oven chips! Perhaps your sauce didn’t emulsify properly because you needed to add more oil? I don’t know but that’s all I can think of! Unless you mean it curdled or split. I bet it was still delish though, I love that tang!
Helen’s last blog post..Rowley Leigh’s Smoked Eel and Bacon Salad.
I’m all for a shortcut so oven chips get the thumbs up! As does the tilapia – it’s a great fish, isn’t it?
Alex’s last blog post..Beef and mushroom pie
That’s pretty much it, Lizzie. The smell hangs around for days and I hate it.
Our Magimix conked out halfway through Helen so maybe the tartar sauce didn’t mix for long enough?
It’s the first time I’ve had tilapia, Alex. It was really good though.
Helen, apart from the Magimix giving up the ghost halfway through, the recipe didn’t actually specify doing it in there and I was chancing my luck by trying it, so am not really surprised that it didn’t work out as it should have 🙂
This looks awesome! I love tilapia – I’ve got very fond memories of living off it in Ghana.
Top stuff.
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Homemade fish & chips?! Good stuff. I still ain’t confident of my frying skills yet!