fish sticks

That would be fish on a stick. How do you get kids to eat their fish? By making it a novelty, and making sure it is boneless. Wouldn't want to choke the little darlings. 

A popsicle stick is inserted into a fish filet. The fish is battered and fried. A potato is cut into matchsticks and parboiled. The parboiled matchstick potatoes are combined with seasoned masa harina with cheese, divided into piles and baked.

The potato takes the longest so that first.

Do you know what that giant onionskin with lines on it reminds me of ?

It happens automatically with every papery giant onion that has lines on it. I can't help it. This is an early lesson from Gardiner so the translation is quite old itself and by now a little bit outdated but it still holds up very well. The text reads left to right, top to bottom, it says: 

Thou shalt pass eternity in happiness and in praises of the god who is in you, thy heart shall be with thee. It will not forsake you.

Isn't that a lovely sentiment to see on an onion? Now that you know this, you can go off to Egypt and start making sense of those little pictures. 

The sweet onion is gigantic compared to the potato which is a mere 3 oz., so only 1/4 of the onion is diced for this. A wedge of the the cheese is sliced off and broken to bits. The potato is parboiled for only a minute. 

The ingredients shown above are combined: Chicken broth, masa harina, spices. Not shown, salt and pepper.

The parboiled potato, onion, and cheese are added. 

The potato piles bake for 25 minutes or however long it takes to brown. I suggest brushing or drizzling or spraying with oil. These were not as good as the similar masa-potatoes fried earlier. This is still in the experimental stage, but I already know that I do love them. Obviously they are not finished at this point. The fish is started and nearly finished as these potatoes are in their final minutes, but they are shown finished here out of sequence for descriptive order. In actuality, the potatoes and the fish finish at the same time. So it is good to have at least four hands or be able to twirl really fast without spilling hot oil all over the place. This is why the kitchen always ends up such a mess. There is simply no time at all to be tidy about it, especially so if you are photographing it. 

For the fish, a separate bowl is prepared with seasoned flour this time, not masa harina, although come to think of it, there is no good reason why not masa harina. I decided on different spices, but they could just as easily be the same spices as used with the potato. 

A shallow dish would be better than a bowl. This bowl is insufficiently wide to coat the fish so the powder is spooned over the fish instead of rolling it around. 

An egg and milk are added to the seasoned flour to turn it into a batter. No leaven in this batter. No bubbly beer, no baking powder. This is not a light tempura-like batter. The batter is not necessarily cold. The viscosity is carefully assessed and adjusted as necessary with milk. If too thin, then with flour. The batter is spooned over the fish in the same manner as the flour. The fish is held by the stick dripping its excess batter into the bowl right next to the hot oil on the stove. When all the excess batter finally drips off then the fish is carefully lowered into the oil by the tip of the stick. The fish is cooked until the batter is done. 

Not shown: the fish on sticks frying. It's a pot of oil with a bunch of bubbles. You've seen it already a thousand times. Possibly four times. 

I laughed my butt off at the scene in Revenge of the Nerds where the kids are in the successful post-graduate's house, the king of the nerds, and one of the visiting kids is asked,

"Is everything alright?"

The nerd answers,

"Yes, fine. It's just that I never saw fish before that wasn't in stick form."