I sure do have a lot of updating to do. The past two months have been filled with plenty of school work and Christmas shopping. Now that I am an alumnus of Florida Gulf Coast University, and now that the holidays are over, I can finally share my latest culinary adventures. I will do my best to recall the recipes exactly, but I apologize in advance if they seem a little rusty. Thanks everyone, for bearing with me.
After such a successful enchilada night, the next Thursday Scott and I opted for fish. He had a terrible craving for a po boy, so we decided to try it out. A fried fish sandwich can't be too difficult...wrong!
Scott got the recipe from the Today Show. One of my favorite Canadian chefs, Chuck Hughes, was a guest on the show, and shared his recipe with the cast. It looked delicious, so off to Publix Scott and I went to duplicate the dish. Click here for the original recipe. This is what you will need:
- 1 cup flour
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
- 1 (12-ounce) bottle medium bodied beer (Scott and I used Newcastle)
- Canola oil (I'm pretty sure we used veg oil)
- 8 (3-ounce) fillets fresh haddock or cod (or go to Publix and get a frozen bag of haddock, and defrost it yourself, like we did)
- salt & pepper
- 2 sandwich size baguettes, cut in half
- Tartar sauce (Scott and I made our own)
- Iceberg lettuce, chopped
Combine salt, pepper, cayenne, and flour in a large mixing bowl. Add the beer and mix well. Be sure not to over mix the batter; you still want to see bubbles. (Our mixture looked a little soupy. I'm still not sure why, because we followed the recipe exactly).
Put at least 3 inches of oil in a deep-bottomed frying or sauce pan. Heat to medium-high heat. You will know when the oil is ready when you can drop a piece of batter in to the oil and it fries right away. (This is where Scott and I ran awry. We ran out of oil and did not have enough to fill our frying pan. We thought we'd be able to shallow fry the fish and flip it when it was ready...we were thoroughly mistaken. The fish flaked apart everywhere in the pan.)
I digress, season your fish with salt and pepper, dip into the batter, then into the oil. Fry all the way through, and place on a paper towel to dry off the excess oil.
Spread the tarter sauce on your baguette, place the fish on the bread, add some chopped lettuce, some hot sauce if you so desire, and there you have it. I hope your sandwich looks much prettier than ours did. The taste was there, but the crunch from the fish was missing.
Not only did we flub on our fish sandwich, but we failed tremendously with our onion ring side dish. The batter did not
stick to the onions and we wound up with soggy, naked onions. Next time, I think we should dredge the onions in flour first before dipping them in batter. At least our cucumber salad was tasty!
If you have any tricks of the trade to a perfect onion ring, or a perfect po boy, please do tell! What is your favorite kind of po boy?
