Filet o' Fish with Fennel Salad

Sometimes, I brave parts of the fish counter for the sake of thrift and I live to tell about it. This is the true (fish)tail of a fishmonger visit that ended well, with just $5 spent, leftovers to spare and a happy discovery: basa. Basa!

I've read a lot about farmed fish and for the most part I'm not impressed verging on squeamish. They are, however, the best bang for your buck and the other night, in the mood for some light white fish, I entered the land of the basa fillet, a farmed mystery fish from Vietnam. Heaven help me.

But guess what? Basa turned out to be light, slightly firm and a somewhat sweet fillet that cooked up beautifully in my grill pan with a little olive oil and lemon juice. I topped it with a little fennel salad and threw some cooked green beans on the plate for good measure. A light and refreshing dinner that will have me returning to the fish counter for some more adventures.

Filet o' Fish with Fennel Salad

2 fillets basa

olive oil

1 lemon

1 small head fennel, shaved thin

1/2 medium onion, sliced thin

1 teaspoon red wine vinegar

1 Tablespoon olive oil

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 teaspoon capers

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

Rub a grill pan with olive oil and heat. It should be hot when you put the fish in. Rinse the basa fillets and put in grill pan. Salt and squeeze lemon juice over the fish. Cook until edges are white and then flip it over to finish cooking. If the pan has gotten super hot, just turn off the heat. The fish will be opaque and flakes in big pieces (unlike flounder, for example.)

Meanwhile, toss together the fennel, onion, vinegar, olive oil, capers, parsley and the juice of half a lemon. I plated the fish with the salad on top, but this could easily be on the side.

Tally:

Fresh fish is within the budget

A nice summery use of fennel

Fast dinner with leftovers for lunch the next day

Fish Taco Time

When I think 4th of July, I think fish tacos.

Ok, I totally don't. But I do think of hot weather and beach holidays, and I really can't imagine visiting a beach without some grilled seafood. One of my favorite fish-eating formats is the fish taco. You have your fresh grilled fish, a cool crisp cabbage, some spicy crema, whatever salsa-like mixture you can conjure, smooth avocado and a soft tortilla to deliver this deliciousness to your hungry mouth. Plus, it's a thrifty way to fit in seafood, a healthy way to have lots of flavor, and a relatively fast and easy dinner or lunch. I made these last week before the weekend bbq-ing commenced.

Fish, itself:

2 filets tilapia

olive oil for grill pan

Salt and pepper

Lime

Rub a grill pan with olive oil and get it super hot. I throw a droplet of water on and when it sizzles, it's time for the fish. Grill tilapia sprinkling with salt, pepper and 1/2 juice of one lime. Turn once the edges start to turn white and repeat sprinkling. The fish should flake easily and you will lose some to the grill pan.

Guac-lite: Avocado + lemon juice + salt

Salsa: 2 tomatoes (from our patio!) + cilantro + 1 scallion + lime juice

Buena Faux-Crema

1/4 c. plain yogurt

Juice of half a lemon

1 garlic clove, grated

1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika

Cabbage Salad

3 cups shredded green or red cabbage

1 radish, sliced thin

1 carrot, shredded

1 Tablespoon white vinegar

1 Tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

Sprinkle of cumin

Mix all ingredients together and set aside.

Low fat tortillas

Ok, so here's where the easy part ends. Even though the thrifter in me knows I'm not saving money, I like to try my hand at making tortillas. I found this Low Fat Tortilla Recipe, and modified it.

1 1/2 c. flour

1/2 c. white corn flour

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 cup warm water

2 Tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

Mix the dry ingredients. In a liquid measuring cup stir the olive oil and water together. 1 Tablespoon at a time add the wet to the dry, stirring to combine. You will find yourself with a very sticky dough. Cover with a damp paper towel and set aside for 20 minutes.

Pull off golf-ball sized chunks of the dough, roll into balls and set on a plate, not touching. Cover with another damp towel and let rest another 10 minutes.

On a very well-floured surface, roll out each ball. Keep the dough moving and definitely keep adding a little flour as you go. Get the tortillas as thin as you can. I'm not going to lie, this is the hard part.

Heat a nonstick pan and add vegetable oil or olive oil. Sacrifice your first tortilla to soak up the grease. Now you're ready to fry the tortillas. Just add rolled out rounds to the pan and when they start to look un-dough like on the bottom, flip them. These move quickly and you don't want them to cook too much because you want *soft* tacos and they can become stiff. The whole roll and fry process takes me about 30 minutes. I usually finish it up as I'm grilling the fish and I make the sides before I get my hands doughy.

Put it all together and there you have it: summer in a soft tortilla.

Ready for mas? You'll have some tortillas left over. Save them and leftover "fixings" for an easy brunch:

Scramble eggs with scallions + tortilla + avocado + spicy crema + tomato + extra scallion

Saucy Sardines

For years I had a serious prejudice against sardines. The problem lay not in the fish, itself, but in the tin and its ubiquitous appearance in old cartoons and children's books as the perfect sized bed for a mouse. Am I the only one with this hang up? I suspect the answer is yes.

I even bought a tin, cleverly hidden in a regular old box, but nothing could get me to open that sucker. It lingered like a boat adrift on the vast horizon of my empty cabinet.

And then, Mr. Lemon and I started adhering more closely to The Fat Resistance Diet. I wasn't losing my heft fast enough in this balancing act of thrift-diet-comfort. More omega-3's were needed. And the answer was there the entire time.

That's right, I resorted to the lonely sardine tin, and it all turned out beautifully as a sauce for some slim leftover lasagna noodles.

Sardine Pasta Sauce

1 teaspoon olive oil

1 small onion, sliced

1 can sardines in marinara sauce

1 teaspoon capers

3-4 leaves rosemary

1 Tablespoon parsley

In a small saute pan, cook onion until softened and translucent. Add the can of sardines and their sauce and break up the sardines with a fork. Once the sardines have started to fall apart a bit, add the capers and rosemary. Just before serving, add the parsley. Serve over a small amount of pasta.

Tally:

Omega-3 packed protein at a low ($2.50) price

Quick, flavorful dinner with a few ingredients

Fears of mice popping out of tins, conquered!

Fish Tail(ends) at Twilight

I feel sorry for leftovers. They get such a bad name.

I prefer to view them as a reason to party. What better way to use smidgens of ingredients than to turn them into nibbles for cocktails? In fact, maybe they should be called invite-overs, because that's exactly what we did last night when a dear friend came over to celebrate the beginning of a new week and watch the sunset from our terrace.

We still had 3-4 small pieces of the poached salt cod from our Baked Cod Cakes. Just enough to turn out some Brandade, a French cod-potato spread:

No, these aren't blue--that's the lovely outdoor light at 7pm last night. I love that it is still light out so late in the evening! Summer is so close I can taste it.

Brandade Toasts

1 cup poached salt cod

1 medium potato

4-5 garlic cloves

1/4 cup olive oil

Ground black pepper

1 baguette

Shred salt cod into small pieces and set aside.

Meanwhile, boil potato until very well done. While the potato is cooking, place 4 cloves of the garlic and olive oil in a heavy saucepan and over low heat cook until the garlic cloves soften (but are not brown.)

Peel the potato and while still warm mash it together with the garlic. Add 2 1/2 Tablespoons warm olive oil a tablespoon at a time.

Add the cod and combine well. If not garlicky enough, grate in half a clove of garlic raw. I did this because I love garlic. Keeps the vampires away. Refrigerate if using later (can be made ahead.)

Cut a baguette into thin slices. Spread brandade on each slice to cover fully. Sprinkle with remaining olive oil and broil on low for 3 -4 minutes. (These burn easily, so you'll want to watch them.) They will be golden on top. Serve warm.

We also enjoyed crudite with Herb Yogurt Cheese Dip (so easy!!) and some very fruitful Pear White Sangria. I'll put those recipes up soon.

Tally:

Not totally FRD-friendly nibbles (white bread, potato): Bad.

Omega-3 rich fish and olive oil provide healthy fats: Good!

Leftovers find their purpose and only one $2 purchase

Great excuse to invite a friend over

One Fish, Two Fish, Pink Fish, New Fish

More fish? More fish!

Recently I've been on the hunt for ways to get more omega-3-rich fish into our daily meals and I had to come back to my old favorite: salmon. Salmon's not the most thriftastic fish around, but it sure is delicious.

I had been dreaming of salmon ever since we enjoyed the most delicious Japanese salmon dish at our friends' house the other week. The salmon had been marinated overnight in another old favorite: miso.

I'm not so patient, so here's my quicky-version of Miso Glazed Salmon.

Miso Glazed Salmon

1/2 lb. filet of salmon

1 Tablespoon white miso paste

2 Tablespoons mirin

1 Tablespoon water to thin glaze

Mix the miso paste and mirin in a bowl. Add water slowly to slightly thin the glaze. Spread on salmon filet and let sit for 10 minutes. Place on baking sheet and place under a broiler about 10-12 minutes (this could be shorter depending on the heat of your oven--as you can see, my oven was a little too hot! I'm still learning how to use the broiler in this kitchen.)

Ginger Honey Carrots

2 cups baby carrots

4 thin slices fresh ginger

1 teaspoon low sodium soy sauce

1 Tablespoon honey

salt to taste

Place carrots and thin slices of ginger in a saute pan and add water to pan (not so much that the carrots are submerged). Cook over medium-high heat until carrots are tender. If there's a lot of water left, drain it off. Add soy sauce and honey and stir. Turn heat down to low and cook until carrots begin look lightly glazed, about 5 minutes.

Green Bean Bundles

Green beans

Fresh chives

Garlic

Run knife or finger along chives to flatten and make the chives more flexible. Tie 3-4 trimmed green bean together with a chive (I wrapped the chive around and then made a little knot.) Place in a steaming basket over simmering water with some peeled garlic until beans are bright green and tender.

Tally:

A rich dish that's both healthy and satisfying

A slight splurge, but still less than going out

Easy fish fast

Fishing for Recipes

At the crossroads of thrifty and lazy, I often find myself trying to find a recipe that will work with what I already have in my (healthy) larder. What usually happens is a sort of food mash-up, if you will, as I compare a few recipes based on ingredients and then take away the instructions I need to make it happen.

So when I was a bit wistful for a long ago Caribbean sailing trip and wanted to eat something healthy and high in omega-3's, the answer was Baked Salt Cod Cakes.

Epicurious turned up Portuguese Style Salt-Cod Fritters and a little Googling led me to Baked Codfish Cakes. The former provided instruction on poaching the cod in milk and the latter provided a baking temp and time, and the much-needed baking powder-to-potato proportion. Then I added in some of my own ingredients to invoke the salty treats we'd had in the British Virgin Islands. Yum.

Makes 12 small cakes

10-12 inch filet of salt cod, rinsed and soaked for 2 days

1-2 cups milk

3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced in half

1 bay leaf

2 medium-sized potatoes

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

2 Tablespoons olive oil

1/2 small onion minced

1 sweet red pepper (small) minced finely, or 1/4 of a regular red pepper, minced

3 sprigs cilantro, chopped

3 sprigs thyme, leave pulled off

2 sprigs parsley, chopped

ground black pepper

This recipe starts 2 days ahead of time, but is well worth it. Rinse and submerge salt cod filet in in water and refrigerate for 2 days. Change the water 2-3 times. Rinse the cod before cooking.

Place the cod, bay leaf and garlic in a saucepan and cover with milk. Add water until the cod is covered. Bring to a boil, turn back to simmer for 20 minutes.

In the meantime, boil the potatoes until very well done. After the potatoes are cool enough to handle, peel and mash in a large bowl.

Remove the cod and once it is cool pull away any remaining skin. Flake the cod (a nice way to check for bones, for us neurotic cooks!) and add to the potatoes. Add 4 teaspoons of the milk-water cooking liquid and the olive oil. The mixture should start to stick together.

Add in remaining ingredients. Form into cakes and place on a greased (olive oil), foil-covered baking sheet. (Parchment paper would be better and might not require the olive oil.) Bake in 375F oven for 15 minutes. Turn over and bake 8-15 minutes more. **My baking sheet is thick, so a thinner sheet may cook the cakes faster.

In terms of health, the potatoes aren't great, but in this amount they aren't a huge carb intake either. Plus, baking the cakes offers the crispiness of cod fritters without the fat. I made these small so we felt like we were eating more and the smaller cakes would also be great for entertaining. Larger cakes might need some more "glue" in the form of more oil or an egg. I'll have to try that next time. This recipe was meant to have leftovers, but of course we ate them all.

I served the cakes with some roasted broccoli to make the meal healthier and a little rum cocktail to complete the Caribbean escapism. The cocktail was another mash-up, landing somewhere between a Painkiller (the drink we had at every port of the BVI) and a banana daiquiri. I had coconut milk to use up from a previous recipe, so this wasn't exactly healthy. In fact, you could call this the Diet-killer: 2 ounces coconut rum/rum + 1 banana + juice of 2 oranges + 2 Tablespoons lime juice + 1/2 can coconut milk + 2 cups ice. Blend it. Drink responsibly.

Tally:

Omega-3's from an inexpensive pantry item

Fried fun without the fat

Fruity cocktail on the terrace -- worth every fattening sip