Fish with butter/lime/spinach sauce

Pangasius. Ha ha ha. That's a funny word. I learned it's another name for catfish, Iridescent Shark Catfish. That leaves me a little bit disappointed because given the Greek sounding name I was hoping for something a little more exotic. And you know what? That does it! This is not going in my ceviche because that last catfish was pure crap for ceviche. Too giggly. Although I confess it was excellent fried. I have a lot more of it in frozen form.


I look at this fish and think, "Eeew, you're just asking to be eaten."

This photo set blew my socks off. Oh,wait. They were already off. Anyway, I couldn't make up my mind which one to use. I keep reading professional photographers saying fluorescent lighting is the worst, but I'm finding as long as I tell the camera we're in a fluorescent light situation, and the fluorescent is the good kind and not the sickly blue kind, then the shots I get are fine. I took shots under all different settings. In the live view the shots looked out of focus in the area I was concentrating, the flaking of the cooked fish flesh, so I kept snapping away trying to get what I wanted. They ALL came out great. Finally I put the camera on automatic and they came out great too, although very different in overall appearance.

I placed a few objects on my work table and picked a few basil leaves so I'd have some vaguely interesting background to bokeh. Bokeh is a photographer's term that refers to the out of focus portion of a photograph. There are different kinds of bokeh depending on the shape of your shutters and depending on your lens and depending on whether it's the background or the foreground that's out of focus, and depending on your camera's ability to produce it. It's all very technical. There is good bokeh and there is bad bokeh. Anyway, I wanted me sum bokeh. These are the objects. ↓ They are not in bokeh, they're in focus.




The fish was gently and briefly fried in an excess of butter. Excessive because I wanted it to be sloppy and have extra left over for sauce. I melted a few cubes of chicken broth, half of it went into butter that was frying the fish about a minute after it started frying. So the fish was steamed in butter and chicken broth with the juice of half a lime. A very large lime. A lime so large it wouldn't fit in my lime squeezer. A big honk'n dripping juicy lime. That took about three minutes to steam then removed from the pan.

The sauce was started in the mini Cuisinart. A handful of baby spinach pre-chopped to give the little blender a head start, plus the remainder of the chicken broth and the other half of lime. Salt and pepper, a garlic clove, and habanero flakes. Then dumped into the buttery pan that fried the fish. See what's happening here? Oil + acid = vinaigrette. Butter + lime = dressing. This is spinach flavored. It disappears as spinach and turns a beautiful bright liquid green that darkens into a an olive shade when it's cooked. I thickened it with a little corn starch which tends to lighten it again, but didn't gauge it and it could have used a little more. It was rather thin. The slab of dead fish filet was placed on a bed of Romaine with tomato, orange bell pepper, cucumber. The sauce drips off the fish and onto the vegetables. It’s all quite cold by the time I get around to eating it.