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Squirrel Melts Recipe Video

A Proud Culinary Moment...

I made another step in the culinary journey. I sought to prepare a delish fish dinner and browsed a few recipes. I boldy took pieces of each recipe and came up with my own menu.

Let's talk fish...

Levi and his dad took my sis and I out fishing on Saturday. It turns out Becka is a total fish slayer. She caught the first, the biggest, the smallest, and the most fish of the day between the 5 people on the boat. Who knew! When we got back, Levi fileted the fish and his friend and I split the meat between us, except Becka's huge rock fish, which remains in my freezer for another day. Enter fishing pictures...

Monday night, a couple friends and Levi were coming over so I had to think about what we could do with this fish for dinner...

To bake or to grill?

To encrust or no?

Sauce?

Sides?

The final decision? Pecan crusted fish with a lemon buerre blanc sauce, mashed potatoes, green beens, Wilson Creek 2005 Chardonnay. Here I will talk about the fish

Before I give you the details, note that there was a lot of left-over crusting and sauce...

The Fish:

We caught white fish and red rock fish and the filets were about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. I bet this would work with lots of different kinds of fish, but I don't know fish all that well. All I know is that I looked for rock fish and white fish recipes, but found these for some other kind of fish instead and thought it sounded good. :o)

The Crusting:

About 1 cup of toasted, chopped pecans... I say get the whole ones and toast them up... just make sure not to chop them up too fine, but not too coarse either

1 1/2 cup of bread crumbs

2 tbsps kosher salt - I would recommend grinding it up a little bit... regular salt is probably too fine, but just regular kosher salt seemed a little coarse

2 tsps pepper

Some chopped fresh rosemary and chopped fresh parsely (I "eyeballed" it... so proud!!!)

Shake all that junk up in a bag and only put into the bowl what you need and freeze or fridge the rest for next time... I wonder if you have to re-toast up the pecans if you fridge or freeze them to get the oils going again... dunno. But wouldn't keep them un-fridged for very long because I hear oils in nuts spoil.

This particular recipe insisted I rub butter (not melted, just softened) on the fish, but that sounded retarded to me so I used something I saw in a different "encrusting" recipe that used olive oil... so...

Fire up the oven to 450 and get a cookie sheet out. The recipe said spray with cooking spray, but I say nay... I like parchment paper instead cuz it rocks.

2 bowls/plates - one with EVOO (so rachel), one with the crusting (I refuse to say breading)

Simple... dip the fish in EVOO (I gave it a quick swish against the dish to get excess oil off, and then press one side into the crusting mixture... press nice and firm so it all gets nice and stuck on there and lay it on the cookie sheet/parchment paper.

Bake 'em for 12 minutes... check for flakiness... mine were perfect at 12 minutes. (I did this recipe a couple nights later with chicken, also delish, and 12 minutes was a bit too long)

Lemon Beurre Blanc sauce:

Beurre Blanc is just a "white butter" sauce. I saw tons of Beurre Blanc sauces with fish recipes... a lot of them looked annoyingly complex, including the one that accompanied an encrusting recipe. Then I saw this one with a grilled fish and it sounded delish. I'll warn you that it takes for freakin ever, makes way too much sauce, and does not taste even a little bit good by itself. Way lemon-y. But it's fairly simple and I learned about how tedious "reducing" liquid is AND that even if a sauce tastes retarded by itself, it could still REALLY complement the food you serve it with... without further ado...

In a saucepan, over medium heat stir together

1/2 cup dry white wine (I used that Chardonnay I mentioned earlier)

1 cup heavy cream

the juice of 4 lemons (I bet 2 lemons and maybe a little more wine would do quite well instead)

Bring that to a boil and then let it reduce to about half... should be a thick-ish sauce

cube up 2 sticks of butter and let them soften just a little. The first time I let them soften too much and the sauce was runny. the second time, maybe not enough and I over reduced the liquid so it was more of a lemon butter spread than a sauce. Anyways, Stir the cubes in slowly until they blend into a nice sauce. Might have to let it cool just a little bit to thicken...

Drizzle that over the fish and even in your taters... YUMMO...

By the way, I mentioned "first time," "second time" in here... when I say second time I am referring to when I tried it with chicken.

So this was kind of a fancy meal for me, but still went pretty quick... gotta say I am super excited that I braved up and put together different recipes... one step closer to culinary fabulousness!!! :-)