Broiled Tilapia with Frisee-Apple Salad & Mustard-Parsley Sauce

Winter in the midwest leads to lots of warm, rich comfort foods to our table.  Nothing beats the chill and nourishes like a serving of baked mac-n-cheese or guinness beef stew.  But all that rich goodness can leave us feeling a little heavy.  Meaning it is time to bring salads back to the dinner menu rotation.

This broiled tilapia and apple salad was just what we needed.  It is sooo good, not to mention healthy and fast making it a perfect dinner option after a long busy day.  It is seriously good eats.  The dressing works nicely with the tilapia and the salad.  The recipe said to put the fish on top of the salad so we did... but I think that next I will put it on the side as that would be my personal preference.  It also called for arugula, frisee and mint to make the salad; we just used a spring greens salad mix (frisee seems to never be available at our local shops).

Broiled Tilapia with Frisee-Apple Salad
& Mustard-Parsley Sauce

Adapted from Cooking Light, Serves 2

Fish

• 1 cup cold water
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 2 tilapia fillets
• olive oil
• fresh ground black pepper & salt

Salad

• 1/2 bag spring greens salad (or arugula & frisee)
• 1  Gala apple, thinly sliced
• 1/2  tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1  tablespoons sour cream
• 1 1/2 tsp whole-grain Dijon mustard
• 1 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 1/2 tsp olive oil

Combine 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon salt, and sugar in a shallow dish. Add fillets, and let stand 15 minutes. Remove fillets from brine; pat dry. Discard brine. Brush fillets with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Preheat broiler.

Place fillets on a broiler pan coated with cooking spray; broil 7 minutes or until done.

Combine apple and 1/2 tablespoon oil; toss well. Add apple and a pinch of salt to salad in a large bowl, toss gently.

Combine remaining 1 1/2 tsp olive oil, pinch of salt, parsley, mustard, lemon juice and sour cream, stirring with a whisk until blended.

Divide salad mixture onto plates; top each serving with 1 fillet (or set along side). Drizzle salad dressing over each serving.

Enjoy!

~ Tara

Making Sushi: The November Daring Cooks Challenge

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge of making sushi was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen.

This was our first Daring Cooks challenge and I was so excited that it was sushi.  Sushi is Dan's very top favorite type of food, I would say he is a sushi fanatic.  And the first time that I had sushi was going out to dinner with Dan way back in college when we started dating.  We have talked about making sushi at home for years and somehow it became one of those things that we just hadn't gotten around to yet.  So this challenge was the perfect excuse to stop procrastinating and to learn how to make one of our favorite foods. We invited over a couple friends for a very interactive dinner party.

All the ingredients were pretty easy to find at the grocery store.  One of our friends had worked at a sushi restaurant and contacted them to get the sushi grade fish; it is available at other local markets but this allowed us to get it at a substantially lower price.  Even if we had paid the retail price for the fish it would have still been a very inexpensive dinner compared to an equal amount of sushi at a restaurant.

The sushi rice was the first step and we timed our evening so that we would have this ready to go before our friends arrived.  We followed the steps exactly but left out the optional dashi kanbu and sake; it turned out to have a very nice flavor and was quite sticky.  There are quite a few steps involved with the sushi rice so Dan and I alternated quite a few times as one of us would always be started on a new prep task when the next step was ready.  This worked well, as long as you communicate so something doesn't get missed or a timing off.

Once our friends arrived we immediately started making rolls; everyone was so excited to try their hand at making sushi.  After we had all made one of the rolls we instinctively started to take stations as if we were running a little restaurant.  One was cutting the fish, the other kept the rolls going, one was keeping the veggie bowls filled, and the other slicing the finished rolls.  We made the dragon roll, several decorative rolls, and the nigiri sushi pieces.  Then we just kept going until we ran out of rice which left us with a few sashimi pieces.  Once the final piece of sushi was eaten we all kind of collapsed into a sushi coma. 

The combos that we made for rolls (of which I can remember) included:

• California rolls: crab meat, cucumber, avocado, carrot
• Tuna, avocado, cucumber
• Salmon, avocado, asparagus, green onions
• Crab meat, avocado, carrots, cucumber
• Dragon: unagi, avocado, asparagus, cucumber; on outside unagi, avocado, and soy glaze
• Rainbow: asparagus, cucumber, carrots; on outside salmon, red snapper, and tuna

I highly recommend hosting a sushi making dinner party.  It was such a fun evening.  The perfect blend of interaction, good food, good company, and learning a new skill together. 

Dan is already trying to get a sushi night on our menu plan for this next week... This may have created a little monster.

Thank you for such a great challenge, Audix and Rose!  For the challenge recipes and details click here.

Wasabi Crusted Cod

I love to shop at Trader Joe's, they have a great selection of very reasonable and delicious fish.  Most of it has been flash frozen within a few hours of catching them.  And most are wild (so not farm raised) which has been shown to have increased numbers of vitamins and minerals along with higher protein content than farm raised fish. 

One of the easiest fish to cook is Cod.  This low fat, dense white fish is light in texture, with no "fishy" taste or smell.  If your British you'll know that Atlantic Cod is the fish of choice in "fish and chips".  This recipe adds a bit of Japanese flair with the use of Wasabi and Panko, or Japanese breadcrumbs.

Wasabi Crusted Cod

2 8-10 oz filets of Cod (if frozen, run room temp water until just thawed; do not use Hot water)

1/2 cup light mayonaise

1 1/2 tsp Wasabi paste (if dried add equal parts of dried wasabi to water and mix)

1 1/3 Panko (japanese breadcrumbs)

1/2 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp kosher salt

Preheat oven to 400 Degrees.  Mix wasabi, salt, mayo in a bowl.  Coat fish with wasabi mixture then coat in breadcrumbs, flip fish and repeat till both sides of each filet are covered in the mixture and breadcrumbs.  Bake at 400F for 13-16 min.  Then place in broiler 4-6 in from the flame for 1-2 min which should be until the breadcrumbs are golden brown and crusted...not burned.

A great, fast and healthy recipe for anytime.  It pairs nicely with the Ginger Carrots that Tara posted recently for a healthy mid-week meal.

Enjoy

- Dan

Red Snapper Baked with Herbs

The benefits of including fish in the diet are well known and published.  Yet we still have to make a conscious effort to remember to add fish to our regular menu.  We love fish and seafood but it can be pricy and not all grocery stores have a great selection.  So we have found the fish selection at Trader Joes to be a fantastic little gem.  Granted, it is not quite as stunning as the display at the Lincoln Park WholeFoods but it is at a great price point for this price-conscious family and the variety is really pretty good.  Dan is like a kid in a candy store when he goes to the Trader Joe's fish department.

For dinner on this past Friday we found ourselves trying to decide how to prepare a Red Snapper filet.  We have a lovely little rosemary plant and while our basil is kind of a sad little plant it had some nice looking leaves so I decided to bake our filet with a simple fresh herb vinegrette.  It turned out to be a very tasty combination and went very well with wild rice.  We were out of lemons so I used a little squeeze of fresh lime juice instead and it worked nicely.

This is not the best photo we have taken (I blame it on the poor lighting in our kitchen and the attempt to get the shot quick before it started to get cold!) but you kind of get the idea...

Red Snapper with Fresh Herb Vinegrette
Serves 2

* Red Snapper filet (large enough for 2 servings or use 2 filets)
* Kosher salt
* Fresh ground pepper
* 1/8 cup bread crumbs

* 1/2 cup olive oil
* 1 clove of garlic, minced
* 10 basil leaves
* Sprig of rosemary
* 1.5 Tablespoons white wine vinegar
* 1/4 teaspoon sugar
* Juice from 1/4 lemon (or lime)

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.

Chop the basil and rosemary, whisk together with with the olive oil, garlic, white wine vinegar, sugar, and lemon juice.

Place fish filet in your baking pan and sprinkle with the salt, pepper, and bread crumbs.  Drizzle the vinegrette over the fish.

Bake for 10-15 minutes or until the fish is flaky.

Enjoy!

- Tara