Recipe: Fish Tacos

With weight watchers in full swing here at our home, we're trying all sorts of new recipes. This one was a big hit, so I thought I'd share.

FISH TACOS (my own original recipe)

Ingredients:

3 tilapia fillets

2 tsp olive oil

2 Tbsp corn meal

salt & pepper to taste

6 mini flour tortillas (6" size)

1 generous cup of shredded cabbage

1 lime (don' substitute with bottled lime juice, it just doesn't work for this recipe!!)

Directions:

1. Spray non-stick pan with olive oil mist and heat to medium-high heat. Rubbed tilapia with olive oil. Mix corn meal with salt (I use kosher salt) and pepper (add some red or white pepper, too, if you like spicy!). Sprinkle evenly over the tilapia.

2. Cook fish in pan, gently breaking it apart into flakes as it cooks.

3. Heat up the tortillas (I do mine directly on the rack of a 350 degree oven for a minute, but you can drop them in a hot dry skillet, or microwave with wet paper towels, however you like.)

4. Divide the shredded cabbage among the 6 tortillas. (I buy the bag of "coleslaw mix" which has carrots, too. To be clear, just the veggies, not actual coleslaw with dressing!)

5. Divide the cooked, shredded fish over the cabbage. Squeeze generously with wedges of fresh lime. Serve immediately.

With my ingredients and measurements, it came out to about 11 points for three tacos (half the batch) which was a HUGE serving. I think I could divide this into 2 taco servings (for about 8 or 9 points) and be just as happy and full at the end of the meal.

Honey

A well known reality of feeding toddlers and preschoolers: They are much more likely to eat it, if they helped to make it. With that in mind, I recruited Malcolm to help me make a vegetable to go with tonight's main course of Dirty Rice with Sausage. Malcolm expressed great enthusiasm over helping me with my cooking project, from start to finish. He picked out a butternut squash from the fridge, and washed his hands while I washed the squash. I cut it in half, then he enthusiastically stabbed it repeatedly with a fork, to break the skin. We microwaved it, then scooped out the pulp. Malcolm sprinkled it with kosher salt and ground the pepper almost all by himself. I saved the best part for last. I let him squeeze the honey.

Now, please understand, that honey is a favorite food for Malcolm, bordering on a sacred experience. When he's sick, he gets a spoonful of honey, per his pediatrician's orders, to help sooth the coughing. This is why Malcolm enjoys being sick. "I can have honey, Mommy?"

Needless to say, Malcolm was delighted to learn that he could squeeze honey into the squash. I watched him stir it all together while I put the honey jar away, listening to him talk about how he was going to eat it, and could he taste it, and Mommy, please put some on my plate. I thought to myself, "I should get the smartest Mommy of the year award."

Dinner came, and he ate his vitamin, then picked all the sausage out of his dirty rice . . . and my dirty rice . . . and Matt's dirty rice . . . and the leftovers still on the stove. But he didn't touch his squash. Hmmm . . . .

"Malcolm," I asked. "Are you going to eat the squash? Remember, you helped me make it. We poked it with the fork, and you mixed the honey in?"

He looked at me, then the squash. "That's the squash, with the honey in it," I told him again.

"I need you to get it out!"

About ten minutes later, when Matthew and I stopped laughing so hard we turned purple, Malcolm sent us back into gales of laughter by adding in his most serious voice, and looking hopefully towards where we store the spoons, "Mommy, I need honey in a different way."

It's Good To Be Two!

One of the simple pleasures of being a two-year-old, is that the pediatrician says "He can have peanut butter now."  This week's favorite food . . . "peanut butter pops."  This basically involves scooping up a dollop of peanut butter on a spoon, then handing it to him.  Malcolm gleefully licks the peanut butter off the spoon, like a kid with a lollipop.

Thus the name:  peanut butter pop.

The only thing better than a PB-pop is . . . . . . self serve!