Today's Menu

1. Sauteed tilapia over mashed potatoes with a lime butter and jalapeno Sauce

2. Salad  from garden with an oregano vinaigrette.

Alice developed this dish a while back, maybe borrowing from Epicurous.  It is extremely quick and easy, and looks great on a plate.  If you got it at a restaurant you’d be pretty happy, I think.  We haven’t been so happy with the quality of the jalapenos we have been buying at the local grocery store, however.  Help is on the way, though.  We have them growing in the garden.  But until the crop comes in we are going to experiment by  adding some of diced habanero pepper (¼ of a pepper, or less).  They are extremely hot so a little goes a long way. 

You can use the rest of the habanero in a Black Bean Soup.  I seem to remember a good recipe for a Carribbean chili in The Joy of Cooking.  That recipe, too, uses a lot of lime juice

Wash your hands carefully after working with habaneros!  Even a little bit rubbed into your eye will burn like crazy.  You will have to turn the garden hose on it for relief.

The fish will kick up a lot of oil when you cook it, so it’s good if you have one of those splatter guards that fit over your frying pan.  Swimming goggles work fine, too, and can be cleaned with the same spray cleaner you use on the stovetop.

The following is pretty obvious but here is an important key to getting this all together.  You won’t fry the fish until the potatoes are hanging out in the oven, the sauce is made, the salad prepped, and the vinaigrette made.  As a result, when the fish is done, assembling plates is quick, maybe 30 seconds per.  This has an important implication:  the chairperson of the tasting panel needs to stop playing computer games now and wash her hands.  Otherwise, the fish is going to set on the plates and continue to cook until it has the consistency of wet cardboard.  The moral of the story, which I often forget to follow, is that when the fish goes on it’s time to give everybody a five-minute warning.  That will also give you time enough to dress the salad after the plates are ready to go out to the table.

I will post a picture later, together with the proportions for the sauce.