Entertaining with Fish

Dining-In Like We Are Eating Out

Last Friday, my sister invited some friends and their kids over for dinner, and she wanted me to make something that looked complex and also appeared effortless.  We decided on doing something with whole fish, and eventually I settled on making an escovitch with red snapper after seeing this video.  It would be something new for me to make and a nice light late evening dinner.  I also made steamed cabbage and roasted chayote to go with it.  My sister made mini New York style cheesecakes for dessert.

We knew ahead of time, that the kids were already going to have had some dinner, so I tried to make something pan-palatable to all ages so that if they wanted some, they would like it.  Plus, cheesecake for dessert is almost always a winner.

I will definitely make it again at some point, and next time try out the rice and peas from the video I used for the cabbage recipe. It looked very good, but my sister asked me to keep it low carb. We saved most of the carbs for dessert. 

Red Snapper Escovitch

It came cleaned and scaled, but I had to take out the gills myself.

After watching a couple videos and researching some recipes online I settled on the following ingredients for the fish and sauce:

• The Fish - Green onion and thyme for the cavity of the fish and lemon with lime juices with salt and pepper for the marinade. I prepped it in the morning with everything but the green onion and thyme, which I added before frying. 
• The Sauce - For spice I used whole pimento seeds (aka all spice), bay leaves, fresh garlic and thyme, Lawry's seasoning salt, sugar, julienned onion, carrot, and (sweet peppers all colors).  Since we do not have scotch bonnets at the HEB and we were serving kids, we opted to use two habanero peppers that were uncut - just pierced once.  The pierced pepper was a useful suggestion from one recipe for if you do not want the whole spice effect.  Next time around, I will go ahead and chop one up to experienced the difference, but there was definitely some heat the way we did it.

After marinading all day. Yes, I know - heads on food is creepy.

I prepared the cabbage with all the ingredients in the video, but with just one cabbage.  The buttery richness of the cabbage dish is a good foil for the acidic fish dish.  We still have leftovers of it to finish and from the sauce for the fish itself. The pickley vegetables from the sauce have been very good on salad.

Romaine lettuce - not subject to the recall. Escovitched veggies and pork loin steak marinated in green chili adobo. The veggies developed more heat just sitting in the fridge.

Left Overs

Dinner was good and there was a fair amount of fish left over for making a nice fish stock the next day. Once I strained it and separated the best bits of meat from the bones, I decided to make some fish and zucchini fritters.  The fish had been cooked twice at this point and we had zucchini that I needed to use up.  It was the perfect use for the remaining fish. Instead of milk, I used the broth with dried milk for the the batter base to help infuse the flavor. I also added some of the vegetables from the escovitch sauce to the fritter mix.  I used this recipe from Emeril, to get the batter base.  I did not really need any of the seasonings from his recipe since I was using the broth and some of the vegetables, which were both already packed with flavor.

We made a sour cream, cucumber, dill, and cilantro mix to top it with, plus I still had the extra green chili adobo from making the chayote.  Those toppings combined on the fritters was an amazing combination.  The low carb Friday dinner became a high carb weekend treat fairly quickly.  I could definitely get used to making fritters for people, but only if there are enough people to eat them in one sitting. What I made could easily feed ten. 

Also good with brie!

Sneak Peak: The Second Project in Fermentation is Underway

One of two ;)