Tilapia with Rosemary

I must start by saying, don’t try this at home.  This is one recipe that I changed that didn’t work for me.  I started to make Tilapia with a dill coating from my How To Cook Everything cookbook, but as I after I mixing the butter and fresh garlic I found that I had no dill: fresh or dried.

No dill, I will just use another spice.  How about dried rosemary, sure that sounds good.  So I added some dried rosemary to the butter/garlic mixture and dropped it in small piles all over the piece of tilapia and put it in the oven to broil for four minutes.

The tilapia came out perfectly cooked, but where I had placed the butter/garlic/rosemary mixture on the fish, I now had hard little piles of cooked rosemary.

Not a problem, I will just scrape some of the bits of rosemary off to the side of the plate before I eat the fish.  That worked, but as I ate the fish, I found that I was also eating small sharp spears of rosemary that lodged between my teeth and stuck into my gums.

The flavor of the fish was good, the rosemary didn’t really add much to the butter and garlic that were the predominate flavors.  Maybe if I had crushed the dried rosemary, it may have worked better.

I may have to make the cookbook version of the recipe with the dill and see how that turns out. 

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell

Dinner and Games

Every few months we invite our Niece Lissa over for dinner and a game night, which happened to be last Friday. I had purchased some Tilapia from Costco and planned to make the Baked Tilapia Rollups using the Paula Deen recipe from The Deen Family Cookbook. We were to make the dinner and our Lissa would bring dessert.

While I prepared the mayonnaise, garlic, and parsley filling, my wife made a very nice green salad. I used the steamer from our new Costco stainless steel cookware set to cook the asparagus. Once Lissa arrived, I baked the Tilapia as it only takes eleven minutes. After everything was done, I found the Tilapia was still a little on the raw side in the middle (maybe because it was almost frozen when I started) so I popped it in the microwave for two minutes to finish cooking.

We enjoyed a wonderful meal of Tilapia, brown rice, salad, asparagus, and rosemary bread. We decided to eat dessert before we started playing our game (no distractions when we play), so Lissa started to prepare our dessert.

This is a strawberry shortcake with homemade whipped cream and topped with fresh strawberries and blackberries. The berries made a delightful mixture that was sweet and flavorful. Our concern with strawberries this early in the year is that they are raised in a greenhouse and don’t have much flavor, but adding the blackberries really enhanced the taste.

It did not take us long to finish off our dessert and then we cleared the table to play Ticket To Ride Europe. This is a board game that our son and daughter-in-law gave us for Christmas and we had a great time playing two rounds of the game.

What a great way to spend a Friday night, good food, good company, and a great game.

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell

Parmesan Tilapia Roll-Ups

Wow, another Paula Deen recipe without a picture, that makes two in a row.  I guess after my success with the Tilapia in Corrie’s Lemony, Buttery Baked Fish, I was looking for another recipe to try tilapia and thought this recipe sounded good.  How could you not love the ingredients in the Parmesan Tilapia Roll-Ups (page 155) of fish, parmesan cheese, and garlic!

On my last trip to Costco, I found they were out of fresh tilapia so I purchased a package of frozen tilapia.  Two days before I wanted to cook this recipe, I took four of the eight individual packages out of the bag in the freezer and placed them on a plate in our refrigerator to thaw. 

When it was time to cook, I removed the thawed tilapia from the refrigerator and cut the ends off the plastic wrap holding the fish.  I slid each fish fillet out of it’s tube onto a plate covered in paper towel.  These fillets had a very firm texture and had just the right amount of moisture without being covered with liquid.

Next, I prepared the sauce.  The recipe calls for eight fish fillets and I only was using four, so I halved the quantity for each ingredient.  The recipe calls for light mayonnaise but I just used one-quarter cup of standard strength mayo.  I approximated the one ounce of parmesan cheese that I grated into the mayonnaise.  I chopped two small cloves of garlic and about five sprigs of fresh parsley then mixed al the ingredients together into a very creamy (and because of the garlic) and potent sauce.

Now I encounter a problem: the tilapia is to be rolled with the sauce in the middle, but each fillet was about two inches wide and three fourths of an inch thick.  There was no way I would be able to roll this fish!  I solved this by slicing each tilapia fillet from the edge and butter flying each fillet.  Now there are four wide and thin fillets of tilapia

I placed each tilapia fillet on my trusty Bakers Secret cookie sheet and placed one fourth of the sauce mixture at the end of each fillet.  I rolled each fillet from the sauce end to make a rollup with the sauce in the middle.  I stuck two toothpicks into each roll to hold it in shape while cooking and then dabbed each roll on the outside with a little olive oil to keep the outside of the fish soft

The cookie sheet and the fish went into the bottom oven or our range where I baked the fish for about twelve minutes and they came out looking great and smelling wonderful!

I completed each plate with some steamed broccoli and some raw sliced carrots.  My wife thought we should add some color to the fish to make it stand out on the plate for the photo, so she sprinkled on a little paprika.  (We now have some nice red plates, but we didn’t get a chance to wash them for this meal.)

This meal was wonderful!  I give it a ranking of ten out of ten.  The fish was light and cooked to perfection.  The sauce in the middle made an excellent sauce and really enhanced the flavor of the dish.

I will be serving this recipe again!

Baked Tilapia with Brown Rice

Last night I tried out another new recipe from Paula Deen's cookbook: The Deen Family Cookbook.  This recipe is Corrie's Lemony, Buttery Baked Fish (page 65).

I grew up North of Seattle Washington, and our family had a 20 foot boat and we would go fishing (it seems like every weekend) on Puget Sound for Salmon.  We didn't catch too many salmon, but we did catch just about everything else that lives in that body of water: red snapper, true cod, sea bass, flounder, rock fish, dog fish, sea plumes, even once a seagull, but that's another story.  I know that I would clean the fish and my mom would cook it up for us, though I don't remember much about how she cooked it.  Typically, my experience with cooking fish is barbequing salmon on my Weber grill and occasionally adding some shrimp.  Even though we are close to the ocean, the seafood available in the standard stores does not seem that fresh.  I have stayed away from cooking fish indoors due to the lack of adequate ventilation that would result in smelling up the house. 

Last week I had a nice lunch with some former co-workers and afterwards I checked out a fairly new seafood store that is close to the restaurant.  This market has a very good selection of fresh and frozen seafood.  One of my former managers was with me and said while the tilapia from this store looked good, that Costco offers both fresh and frozen tilapia.  This is what led me to Costco for my tilapia purchase.

This was a very easy recipe to make; it has seven ingredients including the fish.  I followed the recipe by lining one of my Bakers Secret cookie sheets with foil then laid out the three of the tilapia fillets on the foil, then I sprinkled on a mixture of salt, pepper, and garlic powder.  I made a mixture of butter, fresh lemon zest, and green onions that I spread over the fillets.  Then I put them in the smaller, bottom oven of our Electrolux oven for eleven minutes at 400 degrees.

My wife had already put some brown rice in our rice cooker and it finished about the same time as the fish.  We also had leftover corn and beans from the beef vegetable soup, so we reheated those to go with the fish.

It was a great meal.  I was very pleased with the results of cooking the fish this way.  It was very light and flakey and had a very mild flavor, the lemon and onions really enhanced the flavor.  As I started with good fish fillets, they didn't have the strong "old fish" smell or taste that can ruin a good fish dinner.

This is definitely a recipe that we will use again, perhaps soon when we have some company coming over for dinner.  I did see that Paula Deen also has a similar on-line recipe that uses lime instead of lemon, that also sounds delicious and I am looking forward to trying it.