Spicy Baked Tilapia

Another rather simple dish with its flavour relying on the quality of the fish and the spices used. I am not a frequent user of Tilapia as I often find freshwater fishes to be less tasty, but I thought I'd give this pink variety a try as it was qute cheap. It is sold frozen, gutted and scaled, at around £2.30 per kg. I thought we'd have a big feast with this rather big fish, but it's size turned out to be quite deceiving as there was less meat on it than I thought.

Ingredients used were curry powder (made into a paste first), coconut milk, salt, chillies, onions, curry leaves and pandan leaves.


I fry the onions, curry leaves,chillies and curry paste till fragrant ....


Then mixed it with a bit of thick coconut milk.


Then smear the mixture on both sides of the fish, with pandan leaves on top. Then wrap in foil and bake in a preheated oven for 20 mins. After that, remove from foil and grill both sides on very high heat to brown the fish.



The result did not look brilliant as I struggled to lift the fish off the foil intact as it was quite brittle. However, it tasted great. Maybe next time, I will use a firmer fish like pomfret or mackerel.

Spicy hot bean mussels

This recipe has been adapted from my grandmother's recipe for fried lala (clams). As lala is not available in the UK, I use fresh mussels for this dish. Mussels are relatively cheap here, you can get them for about £2 per kg.



Also worth noting that we can get something like lala here too, but it looks different. Look at this picture.. on the outside, it looks like a blood clam (see hum), but once opened, it looks like lala. They cost similar to mussels but I dont use these often because the shells are dirtier and takes a lot of scrubbing before I can fry them whole.


This dish is simply:
- chillies
-onions
- garlic
- capsicum
- hot bean sauce (chilli meen see)
- cornflour to thicken sauce so that it sticks to he mussels

Method:
Fry onions, chillies, garlic, capsicum and hot bean sauce.
Then add cleaned and de-bearded mussels and cook till all shells are opened.
No need to add water as mussel will have its own juice.
Then little bit of cornflour mixture to thicken.
Soy sauce / Salt / sugar / pepper to taste.