Broiled Fish Fillets and Cheesy Grits

Day 13-This should have been an unlucky night, but it wasn’t. Thank goodness! After a few days of restaurant food and take-out it was time to get back to cooking. I tried to plan a menu this week that Anthony might enjoy. I tried to keep meals with a lot of veggies away and bring in some side dishes other then rice. I knew that he was going to like what I was making tonight. I first encountered Justin Wilson while I was living in Pensacola, Fl. I watched an old episode of his show. He was from Louisiana and cooked Cajun food. Most of his food is hearty and you can tell that he really liked to eat. I choose to make the one recipe in his cookbook; Justin Wilson’s Homegrown Louisiana Cookin’ , that he states was diet food for him.

Anthony has made this recipe a few times. I figured I couldn’t go wrong then, in trying it myself. The recipe leaves it up to you to decide what sort of fish fillets you would like to use. I choice catfish fillets in keeping with the Southern theme of the meal. We like catfish and used to eat it a lot more often when we lived in the South. You can follow his recipe exactly and I’m sure your fish will turn out quite tasty. I didn't follow his recipe completely. Anthony and I are really into the taste of Frank’s Red Hot and use it on everything. So to make this recipe have some more kick to it, we make the sauce with more hot sauce then his recipe calls for. So after remembering to halve the recipe I took ½ a stick of butter and melted that in a small sauce pan. Then I added ½ tbsp of lemon juice, ¼ tsp of onion powder, ½ tbsp dried parsley and the biggest change, ¼ cup of hot sauce. Yum!! If you don’t love hot sauce as much as me, then you might just want to stick to the original recipe. If you want to give it some pizzazz, then give it a try.

Then instead of spreading the butter onto the broiler pan, we spread it on both sides of the catfish. Put it in the broiler, until the fish is cooked. It turns out this was the one issue I had. I have never cooked catfish, it’s a little thicker then the only fish I’ve ever cooked which is tilapia (besides my recent foray into salmon). So I left it in for 12 minutes, checked it and put it back in for 3 more minutes. It really did looked cook! Meanwhile as the fish is cooking, I decided what better to pair with this dish then cheesy grits with some hot sauce in them. There is nothing like down home southern cooking. The only things missing were the cornbread and collard greens. I probably put a little too much cheese in the grits, but it’s cheese who doesn’t love cheese?!

The fish was now cooked and I spread some more of the butter hot sauce mixture on top. Once I plated the dish and we started eating the fish, we realized that the thicker parts were not completely cooked. Oh well, you can’t win them all. I’m certainly not the first one to undercook something; I see it happen a lot on those reality cooking shows I talked about earlier. We just ate around the uncooked part. I have to tell you though cooking seems to either be becoming easier or I’m just picking easier things to cook. Let’s just says it’s a combination. That will make me happier!

Final Product:

Not pretty, but tasty!

I will be making this dish again and I will be adding some collard greens to the meal. Yum! I love this style of food. It makes me feel all happy inside. The grits recipe is available, along with all the other recipes I have made through the link on the right, Recipes Used for The Hesitant Cook.

Totals: 15 minutes cooking time, 2 pans. Hmmm noticing the lack of prep time needed to make this recipe, I’ve now decided this is why I didn’t hate cooking last night. Well at least I now know why I liked it.

Next up: Blackberry Chicken Skewers