Weekly Dish

This week’s menu:

• Monday: Paneed tilapia with spicy lemon spaghetti
• Tuesday: Flank steak with cilantro pesto and roasted acorn squash
• Wednesday: Fish cakes with red and green tomato tart
• Thursday: Butternut squash soup with spinach salad

This week marks my post-holiday return to regular meal-planning and dinner-cooking. In thinking about the new year and our diets, I like to think of things I can include in the menu, not things I should take away. For instance, I tried to do the low-carb thing a couple of years ago, but I found myself imagining pasta dishes and big loaves of homemade bread all day, and I went through a phase where I really didn’t want to see meat at all. It’s purely psychological, I’m sure–I was probably one of those kids who never wanted to touch the stove until my mom told me not to. (Over at Sweetnicks, she’s encouraging food bloggers to participate in the same kind of logic by including more Antioxidant-Rich Foods in our diets on Tuesdays. I don’t think this recipe qualifies; maybe next week!)

The two things I have decided we need to eat more of (which automatically means we will eat less of other things, right?) are fish and vegetables. Last night’s menu was a stab at the former; the rest of the week, I’ll concentrate more on the latter.

In the past, I have had a difficult time with fish in my kitchen. I’ve tried different kinds and different preparations, but rarely liked the fish that I cook. For this dish, (armed with inspiration from Beyond Salmon, a delightful blog about fish) I followed all the rules: I bought very fresh fish, cooked it the same day I bought it, seasoned it well but simply, and didn’t overcook it. I’m happy to report that it was a success! Paneeing the fish gives it a nice, brown crust, and leaves bits of the crust stuck in the pan perfect for a deglazed wine sauce. I paired it with a simple lemony garlic pasta topped with toasted Parmesan and finished the whole plate with the wine sauce.

By using the same skillet to cook everything, the vegetables that you cook to flavor the pasta will also flavor the oil for the fish, giving everything a nice consistency. The toasted Parmesan is optional; it’s a trick I’ve been wanting to try and thought the cruch might be a nice complement for the pasta (I’ll use the leftovers to garnish the soup later this week). It was…but definitely not necessary.

The trick to paneeing is to get the pan really hot–the fish will cook quickly, especially if you have thin fillets, so make sure your pan is hot enough to brown the crust before adding the fish. I also use mostly olive oil with a tiny bit of butter for color and flavor, but any combination of fat will do the trick. You have to be careful if you use all butter because it will burn easily if you get the pan too hot.

If you are trying to watch your carbs, this fish would also sit nicely on a bed of spinach, which I imagine you could wilt and flavor with the garlic, jalapeno, and lemon zest in the same manner as the pasta. Maybe I’ll try that next time and hit both the fish and vegetable in the same night!

My favorite part about the dish is that once you get the prep-work done, it cooks very quickly. I’ve written the recipe for the fish and pasta out in steps because that’s how I had to think it through in order to have everything ready at the same time.

Paneed Tilapia with Spicy Lemon Spaghetti

4 tilapia fillets, about 8 ounces each
Flour
Creole seasoning, such as Tony Chacheres
Olive oil
Butter
2 lemons
1 jalapeno pepper
4 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
1/2 pound thin spaghetti or angel hair pasta
2 ounces Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup dry white wine
Green onions, for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil, and coat with nonstick spray. Grate or shave Parmesan cheese onto the foil in a single layer. I use a vegetable peeler to get long, thin strips. Cook the Parmesan until brown and crispy, about 8-10 minutes. Remove and set aside.

2. Prep the vegetables: zest the lemons, slice the pepper, garlic, and green onions. After zesting, cut both lemons in half. Cut one half into paper-thin slices.

3. In a baking dish or on a large plate, lay the fillets side by side in a single layer. Dust with flour and the Creole seasoning on both sides. How much seasoning you use completely depends on your taste; just remember that the seasoning mixture contains a good bit of salt, so you don’t want to overdo it, or the fish will be too salty (does it sound like I speak from experience? I do!)

4. Bring some water to boil on one burner. Add one lemon, halved, squeezing the juice into the water and tossing in the shells as well.

5. On another burner, heat some olive oil (once around the pan) and a tiny amount of butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic, lemon zest, lemon slices, and the jalapeno. Cook until the zest and garlic are beginning to turn golden. Turn off the heat. Remove the lemon slices for garnish.

6. When the water is boiling, add the pasta and cook until it reaches your desired tenderness. Drain and return to the pot. Drizzle with olive oil and toss with sauteed lemon zest, pepper, and garlic, making sure to scrape in the oil from the skillet too. Set aside to keep warm (I just stick the whole pot in the microwave).

7. Heat about 2 tablespoons of oil (enough to get a good, thin layer on the bottom of the skillet) and a pat of butter over medium-high heat. Add the tilapia fillets, pressing into the skillet with a spatula, cooking until the outside is brown and crispy and the inside is just beginning to flake, about 4-5 minutes per side. I had to cook the fillets in batches, two at a time. Make sure to keep a good layer of oil in the bottom of the pan, adding more if you need to.

8. Remove the fish from the skillet and add the wine, a tablespoon of butter, and the juice from half of one of the lemons. Cook for about 2 minutes, scraping up the bits in the bottom of the skillet and stirring constantly.

9. To serve, mound some pasta in the center of the plate. Top with a fillet of fish, some toasted Parmesan, lemon slices, and a handful of chopped green onions. Drizzle lemon-wine sauce over the fish and pasta.

I had two leftover fillets, which will make an apperance later in the week in the guise of cakes. Stay tuned!

Posted: Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 9:02 am Filed under: Main Dish, Weekly Menu, Pasta, Seafood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.