Spin on the Classic Fish and Chips

Josh: Hey, everyone! Welcome to our blog! This is officially our first meal post. We’re very excited to get this started, but first, let’s explain how a lot of this will work.

Kandice: Yep! Let me explain how we're going to do things. We plan to have one main post per week. This main post will consist of the recipe that both Josh and I got together to work on. Along with that will be a write-up about what we did, what adjustments we made, and what mistakes we had.

Josh: Of course, we hope for as few mistakes as possible. Also, along with our weekly main post, either Kandice or myself may post little updates, stories, or mini recipes that we have made. Those will look the same as the weekly posts, just miniaturized.

Kandice: So just keep an eye out for new posts frequently. We don’t have a real set schedule yet, but be sure that we’re working on it!

Josh: So on to our first recipe. This week we made Crispy Fish Strips and Cheesy Garlic Mashed Potatoes. Here’s a write-up for you guys. The recipes are also below.

This week, Kandice and I were able to meet up one evening to make the first meal of JK’s career. We originally decided on the Crispy Fish Strips and A Creamy Cheese Potato recipe, both of which we got from Food Network’s website. Unfortunately, the potatoes fell through, due to a mishap with them becoming too tender to work with. Oops. So instead, we just mashed the potatoes. I worked on the fish, while Kandice prepared the potatoes. Here’s how it went.

Crispy Fish Strips

Ingredients:
4 slices whole-wheat bread (1-ounce each)
Cooking spray
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound flounder fillets
2 eggs, beaten to mix
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1/3 cup nonfat plain Greek-style yogurt
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon snipped fresh chives
Pinch cayenne pepper, optional

I’ve never made fish before and I don’t eat fish all too often either. Once in awhile, sure, I’ll get the fish and chips at a restaurant, but I don’t normally have fish at home so this was a first. It was a big learning experience for me. Although I had a lack of know-how, the fish turned out great! We bought one pound of fish fillets. The recipe calls for flounder, but we used Tilapia instead. They were prepackaged, and we got about 6 or 7 fillets. I took those out of the bags, and looked them over. Any extra scales that were left on, and/or pieces of fin that were still attached to the top, I cut off. After they were nice, neat, and clean, I cut them into strips about an inch wide and however long the fillets were. I got a total of 12 or so strips from our fillets.

Next I set up my own little station (Pictured Above). I took the flour, salt, and pepper mixture, and one by one, dipped the fillets into the mixture to coat them. Then I put the fish into the eggs, then into the breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs were made from four pieces of whole wheat bread that was pulsed in a food processor until they were fine, and then toasted in a skillet until they were golden brown.

Now that all the fish was breaded properly, I put them onto baking sheets that were coated with an olive oil nonstick spray. When I asked Kandice for said baking sheets, she began to shuffle around the kitchen, searching for what I assumed to be the baking sheets. She then said, “I have aluminum foil… that’ll work, It’ll just cook the fish a little faster.”

Needless to say, I had no idea what she was talking about.

She then responded with, “Oh! You said Baking sheets! I thought you said, ‘wax paper’.”

…What?

Anyway, now that the breaded fish was on the baking sheets, I put them in the oven at 400 degrees F for ten minutes or so, or until they were done with no pink in the middle.

I did not make the tartar sauce that was included in the recipe. If you want to make that, It consists of everything below the line in the recipe I’ve posted. You can find instructions on the Food Network website, where we found both of our recipes for this meal.

Cheesy Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients:
Salt
24 bite-size new potatoes, scrubbed, with a tiny sliver cut off each potato so they will stand after filling
1 (5-ounce) package soft garlic herb cheese (recommended: Boursin)
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, softened
1/3 cup whipping cream
Freshly ground black pepper
Finely chopped fresh parsley leaves

Well as you already know by what Josh said earlier, the potatoes that I made didn’t turn out exactly how we had wanted them to. Don’t get me wrong, the potatoes were delicious! I just had to improvise a little when the potato explosion occurred. But more on that later …

The first thing that I had done was boil the potatoes, in a large pot of water, until they were tender. I tested them with a fork about every 5-7 minutes to try to tell when they were done. But apparently I wasn’t watchful enough. After about 20 minutes I stuck the fork in one of the potatoes and well … kaboom! Not really but it did break in half unexpectedly. Once this happened I knew that they were definitely done so I drained the potatoes and set them aside to cool.

Since the potatoes were too soft to carve them out with the melon baller, I decided to make them mashed potatoes instead! No one knew the difference when I served them. It’s not like anybody but Josh was reading the recipe while I was making the potatoes. So I mashed them up, skins and all, to make our meal.

I then combined all of remaining ingredients with the potatoes and spooned them in a pan. For something a little extra I sprinkled some of the remaining cheese on the top and stuck the potatoes into the oven along with the fish. When the fish and potatoes were finished we took them out of the oven. Everything smelt and tasted so good!

Josh: We hope you've enjoyed our first post, and we also hope that you'll come back and check us out again next week. We'll have a new recipe, a new story to tell, and hopefully no food poisoning.

Kandice: If you would like to reach us to comment on our blog or to suggest recipes, modifications, kitchen gadgets, etc, you can reach us at our e-mail: jkdailyspecial@gmail.com. Feel free to send us ideas and comments as to how we can make our site better. Thank you all!