Fish in a Flash
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
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.







sandwiches; the original recipe comes from Jane and Michael Stern’s Southern California Cooking from the Cottage: Casual Cuisine from Old La Jolla’s Favorite Beachside Bungalow, reprinted in 