da da da da da da da – TEQUILA

This song has been stuck in my head for the past 24 hours… so for some reason it was really difficult for me to decide what to cook for alcohol week. I considered making chili with beer in it, but I still have so much soup in the freezer from week 3 I don’t think I have the tupperware to hold any more chili. I also still have eggnog from week 0, but that’s hard to cook with unless you’re making french toast (which I have tried, and it is indeed delicious). I really wanted to use my dark rum to make Jamaican jerk chicken, but alas, it is the dead of winter and to do jerk chicken right you really need to grill it, and my $18 Walmart grill can barely hold its heat when it’s hot outside. The more I thought about cooking with my brandy, the more I wanted to drink it, so using that was also out of the question.

My solution: buy tequila!

So I made fish tacos and guacamole, each with pretty much identical recipes. This is such a quick dinner to make, especially with a mini food processor. I’m sure an immersion blender or regular blender would work just as well.

The fish taco recipe is adapted from Alton Brown’s Fish Taco Recipe – I roughly halved the recipe, added some serrano pepper for some spice, and opted out of measuring the ingredients.

Fish Taco Ingredients:

Handful of cilantro

Handful of cilantro Small pile of cumin

2 cloves garlic

1/2 serrano pepper

Small salt mound

Grind black pepper for awhile

Zest of 1 lime

Juice of 1/2 juicy lime

Tequila until it looks wet enough to be a marinade (~2 Tbs)

2 tilapia fillets

Vegetable oil

Fish Taco Instructions:

Puree the first 7 ingredients in your favorite pureeing vessel (I chose the food processor). Once the serrano pepper is minced, squeeze in the lime juice and then pour in the tequila. Salt and pepper the tilapia, and put it in a zip lock bag with the marinade while you make the guacamole (~15 minutes).

Heat up the oil in a pan, put the tilapia in a pan, coat with the remaining marinade, and cook the tilapia for a few minutes on each side until flaky. And the fish is done! That was easy!

Guacamole Instructions:

For simplicity’s sake, I duplicated the recipe for the fish for the guacamole. I omitted the cumin, cut back a little bit on the cilantro and tequila, but otherwise it’s exactly the same. There is also one avocado and one roma tomato, insides removed.

Blend beginning chunk of ingredients with the alterations I just mentioned in the food processor, and again add the lime juice and tequila. Normally I make chunky guacamole, but my avocado weren’t quite as ripe as I’m used to so they weren’t mashing too well, so I threw one avocado cut up into chunks into the food processor with the rest of the ingredients. Once the mixture was creamy, I chopped up the roma tomato and mixed it into the guacamole.

Putting it all together

I heated up some corn tortillas, sliced the fish into strips, and cut up some lettuce to put it all together for the final fish taco!