Showing posts with label fish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fish. Show all posts

Thursday, February 16, 2012

tilapia with vegetables

(this was really written on January 27th but I never got around to publishing it)

Ta-da! Look who's back.
Sorry for being MIA. I just can't seem to stay committed to anything, I'm so all over the place.
Quick update: We've moved to a new apartment and it's exciting because I'm sort of trying to do up the place but it's going slow, what with Newbah and college etc.

I cooked something today while the baby was sleeping and actually managed to take pictures! Wasn't sure how it would turn out but I just served me some lunch and, Yum.

Here's how it goes, before I forget:

Oil, I used Olive.
Tilapia, 2 fillets, quartered
1 small onion, chopped
Ginger/garlic paste - 1 to 2 teaspoons, depending on how much you like. I think I put a little more than one.
Red chili powder to taste. I didn't want to make it too spicy in case I wanted Newbah to have a taste (that didn't happen), so I put a little less than a teaspoon.
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander powder
Salt to taste - I still can't figure it out with this sea salt business. I need to go buy some regular salt.
Half a tomato, because that's all I had, but I would definitely put more next time. Diced.
Two really skinny carrots, sliced into little rounds. I feel like the carrots shrank since I bought them. Shrank is a word?
3 mini sweet peppers, sliced. You must use only three, one of each color; no more and no less, else everything will be ruined.
About half a cup of french cut green beans, I used the frozen kind.
Black pepper and dried basil, just for sprinkling
Cilantro; obviously, the more the better.

(Scramble with Friends is distracting me right now but I will ignore it and keep writing about fish)

And so, I chopped up my little onion and threw it into this wok-like-but-not pan that I found in the cabinet, with what I felt was an appropriate amount of olive oil. Probably like, 1/4 cup, maybe a little more/less. I'm still getting used to the stove here so for a while I was just doing stuff like slicing carrots and I realized nothing was happening to the poor onion at medium heat. I then raised the heat till the onions were soft and slightly cooked but not brown. Transparent is what you call it, I believe. I added the ginger/garlic paste, cumin seeds, chili and coriander powders, and the diced tomato. I let everything cook and simmer for a bit (we're probably back down to medium heat now) and added the carrots. The reason I added the carrots so early on is so they could get cooked through better before I put in anything else, because everything else I was using cooks up faster than carrots. I am rambling.

Once the carrots seemed like they were softening up a little bit, I threw in the sweet peppers and green beans. While I waited for the beans to thaw in the pan, since I had taken them straight out of the freezer, I quartered my fish fillets, cilantro, took lots of pictures and what not. I really wanted to put the pictures in here but I found it was easier to just put them on my tumblr like so. Check it out!

And so upon the bed of vegetables and such, I carefully placed the pieces of tilapia, turned them over after a couple of minutes, and then covered the pan with the heat on low.

Then I realized nothing was happening so I turned it back up to medium.

I, in the meantime, super-human that I am, cleaned/washed/wiped/threw away/put away everything that I had used in the kitchen so far, started the rice in the rice cooker, drank a glass of milk and did other such extraordinary things. Somewhere along the way I turned the fish and everything else with it over a few more times, carefully so as not to break it, and sprinkled it with black pepper and basil. And closer to when the fish was done, I added some chopped cilantro.

I don't know how you tell when fish is done cooking but when it looked to me like it was done, I turned the stove off.

And then Newbah woke up from her nap and I fed her zucchini puree. And I fed myself this:


Don't forget to check out the rest of the pictures at guftugoo!