Breaded Tilapia and Chips with Homemade Tartare Sauce

Over the past 24 hours we’ve been through many different potential menus for the weekend.  The main driver for this was that we couldn’t find the ingredients for our first choices, but I think we still over-thought it quite a bit.  In the end we settled on breaded fish for this evening and shuffled and re-organised everything else around it.

We bought two tilapia fillets and some oven chips (I know - cheating - but we don’t have a deep fat fryer yet) and tried our hand at making our own tartare sauce.  The tilapia turned out rather well, but the tartare sauce didn’t emulsify properly and was too runny but still tasted good (if a little like capery salad dressing).  We ate some steamed brocolli with this, which also went well with the pseudo-tartare sauce.

As we made up the fish recipe as we went along, this is an approximation:

Ingredients:

2 tilapia fillets

4 tbsp plain flour

1 tsp paprika

salt and pepper

1 cup fresh bread crumbs (these are easy to make by putting bits of white bread into a food processor)

1 egg, beaten

1 tbsp vegetable oil

10g butter

Method:

Mix the paprika into the flour, then season with salt and pepper.  Put onto a plate (this needs a lot of plates…).  Pour the beaten egg onto a second plate.  Spread the breadcrumbs out on a third plate.  Then dust the fish fillets quite generously with the flour.  When that is done, dip them into the beaten egg and finally coat them in the breadcrumbs.

When they are both breaded, heat up a frying pan to medium heat.  When the frying pan is hot, add the oil and the butter and when the butter has melted, add the fish.  Cook for 4 minutes on each side, then serve.