Release the Blacken!

We not only make our own tacos, but also our own animated .gif's!  Simmer, my pretties...simmer...

  

Mmmmmm, fish tacos are great, but to make them in the traditional fashion on a weeknight can be a bit cumbersome, what with the dredging and the frying and the what have you.  Overtime, we developed a fish taco recipe that's easy, fast, and tasty.  Instead of frying the fish, we blacken it and then put it in a taco with a semi-traditional fish taco dressing. You'll start to sense a theme here at Chez Venza: we took two previously existing recipes and then put them together.  

We like to keep frozen fish filets, shrimp, and chicken tenderloins on hand basically all the time.  They're relatively healthy (as if that's why we do it), and they all basically defrost fast enough that you only have to put them in the fridge the night before for mid-week dinners.

  So one fish recipe we tried is one for Blackened Tilapia, though you could probably use any white fish.   Very easy to prepare and make.  Nice and spicy.

After a couple of dinners of this we put it in a tortilla with a traditional fish taco dressing.  I'm having trouble finding the recipe on foodnetwork.com, but its basically sour cream, mayo, cilantro, lime juice and some of Emeril's BAM seasoning.  

The "before" picture

Aye, there's the rub.

As you can see, a very subtle seasoning

       The blackening:  This is done at relatively high heat and results in a fair amount of excess spice burning in the pan.  As you might imagine with a blackened dish, it can be tough to tell when its burning TOO much.  

 Another Chez Venza tradition: when we're making crunchy tacos (which we did recently) we buy this weird broccoli cole slaw to use instead of lettuce.  Lettuce is a pain in the ass on tacos.  This stuff keeps longer and has a better crunch.  For tonight's recipe, we mixed it in with the sauce to make a tangy, spicy slaw.

See?  Slaw!

The "after" picture:  crunchy, creamy and spicy!

We also served it with this delightful salad of arugula topped with green bell peppers, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, croutons, Parmesan and a homemade parsley vinaigrette, but come on... who blogs about salad?  Please.