In Hot Oil

I decided to make something very different last evening, using a cooking method that we rarely use. That's right folks, it was a fried-foods-palooza!

I have boneless tilapia fillets in the freezer and potatoes in the pantry. Fish and chips, anyone? Except... let's make pommes frites instead of regular french fries (English chips).

I have three russet potatoes for three people. While peel-on french fries are delicious, my husband prefers his peeled, so the good wife peels the potatoes.

Now, this is one of my tricks to stress-free cooking: I go into the kitchen in the afternoon and do a lot of the prep work then, so that come dinner time all that is left is the actual cooking.

Since these potatoes will be sitting a while before they cook, I submerge them in water so that they don't turn brown.

More prep work: here we have the ingredients for the fish. Cornstarch will coat the cut fish so that the wet batter will stick to the wet fish.

Beer, Old Bay seasoning and Beer Batter Mix combine for the batter.

I took three tilapia fillets out of the freezer.

Slice each fillet crosswise into 1 to 1-1/2 inch strips. Notice that I used my fish cutting mat in order to eliminate cross-contamination.

Coat the tilapia strips with corn starch and store in the refrigerator until needed.

Mix together the batter according to package directions. I also added a bit of Old Bay seasoning for additional flavor.

Hmm, daughter Kelley has been craving fried pickles. I think I'll have to add this to the menu.

Inspired by Rosie Hawthorne and some recipes online, I decide to make a blue cheese dip for the pommes frites and the fried pickles.

I mixed together equal parts mayonnaise and light sour cream and added in a pinch of ground cayenne pepper, a dash of Frank's Hot Sauce, 1/3 finely diced celery, a couple of tablespoons of minced red onion, minced celery and parsley leaves. Lastly, I stirred in enough crumbled blue cheese to suit.

Into the refrigerator this goes. Heh, I sound like Sandra Lee.

And finally we get to the cooking. First, I heated the oil to 300 degrees and cooked the potatoes for 3 minutes.

Take out of the oil and drain. This is the first step to making pommes frites, which are twice-fried french fries.

After the oil has been heated to 350 to 375 degrees, it's time to start cooking the rest of the food.

First, daughter Kelley coats the drained and dried pickles in the batter and adds them to the oil.

Set aside to drain.

Next comes the fish. Remember to not crowd the pan and don't over-cook the fish.

You know, the cook needs a snack to sustain her through the tedious cooking process. Don't mind me as I snack on these lovely fried dill pickles.

After the fish was finished cooking, I began frying the pommes frites a second time. Unfortunately, this is also about the time my old electric skillet decided that it was tired.

The first clue was that despite giving the oil plenty of time to come back up to temperature, the french fries just wouldn't brown. Indeed, they ended up a bit greasy, which is a sign that your oil is not hot enough.

The second clue was when my daughter went to pull the plug out of the outlet only to find that the plug was almost too hot to handle and sparks flew as she disconnected the plug from the outlet. In addition, there is now a scorch mark on the face of the outlet.

I don't need to tell you that the skillet went into the trash after it had cooled.

Now, I need to figure out how I am going to replace it. Do I get a dedicated deep fryer? Hmm, but we only deep fry foods a very few times a year. Do I get another (this was my second) electric skillet? Or do I lay out a nice wad of money for a heavy dutch oven? Decisions, decisions...

And by the way, this was delicious, even with the drama. A nice pea salad rounded out the dinner. But I do think that I will stick to just frying my french fries once from now on.