Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Food Matters Project: Mexican-Style Fruit Salad w Fish



I had a lot of fun with this week's Food Matters Project. Thank you, Sarah, for picking such a fun recipe! I've been wanting to try out a sweet potato crusted fish recipe I ran into quite some time ago while lurking on pinterest. This gave me the perfect opportunity.

I don't know about you guys but this life is busy. I just tried to schedule hiking with a friend on a Sunday coming up and realized that I have 3 unplanned Sundays between now and SEPTEMBER. That's crazy. I can't wait for it to be true summertime when the sun doesn't go down until almost 10pm and it becomes easier to go play outside after work. Slowing down to plan out a meal, prepare the ingredients and share the results with the people I love best feels so important and so good.



adapted from this good recipe and the food matters cookbook.

mexican style fruit salsa

1 orange, zest and diced
1/2 a jalapeno, diced
1/2 english cucumber, sliced and diced
1/4 of a red onion, diced
1 lime, zest, 1/2 chopped, 1/2 juice
handful cilantro

sweet potato crusted & baked salmon

3/4 pound of salmon, cut into two pieces
1 medium sweet potato, grated
1 egg
steak and salmon salt mix (thank you, libertine tacoma)

broccoli
salt&pepper
olive oil

Combine orange, jalapeno, cucumber, red onion, lime zest and juice, cilantro - set aside.

Heat oven to 375. Place broccoli on a pan. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Set the pan in the oven.

Meanwhile, rub salmon (both sides) with whisked egg and season with salt. Drizzle a small amount of olive oil in a large skillet and then place grated sweet potato on the skillet to match the basic shape/size of the fish. Place each piece of fish on the sweet potato bed and allow to saute on medium for about four minutes. Using a flipper, carefully remove fish and sweet potato from the skillet. Place another layer of sweet potato on the skillet and flip the fish onto the new layer. You now have both sides of your fish coated with grated sweet potato. Allow to saute for another couple of minutes.

Open the oven and place the crusted fish on the pan with the broccoli. Bake until fish flakes easily with a fork. About 20 minutes or so. If you like a rarer fish you could skip the baking step.

Remove from oven and serve with the mexican-style fruit salsa.





8 comments:

  1. You put the fruit on top which makes sense to me. I read it three times to make sure it said, on the bottom, but I like the fruit,in this case as a topping although it worked beautifully as Bittman advised.

    I made salmon also and seeing what you did with the sweet potato is inspiration to make that, next time.

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  2. Sweet potato crusted salmon sounds amazing! I would have never thought of this and now I can't think about anything else. Next time I make salmon, I'm going for this recipe :-). Glad you liked the pick!

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  3. I've made fish with grated regular potato but never thought of sweet potato. What a great idea!

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  4. That sweet potato topping on salmon would have never occurred to me, but what a great idea! Looks even better with the fruit mixture on top. Thanks for the inspiration, Jennifer!

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  5. oooh... the sweet potato crust sounds delish! i also like the cucumber and red onion salsa... great pairing!

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  6. Sounds delicious!!!

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  7. Ooo, sweet potato crust sounds delicious! Was it fairly easy to make and did it stick?

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    1. it was fairly easy to make and stuck together well enough for me. the original recipe calls for flour to help with the sticking process but i didn't use any and i'm still satisfied with the end result. it's definitely easier to do medium to small pieces at a time for flipping purposes.

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