Friday Night Fish Fry

As I've said before, my daughter loves seafood, but it is often prohibitively expensive.  During Lent, grocery stores often have deals on fish fillets, but I prefer my own recipe to the frozen patties.  I will, however, buy frozen fish when it's on sale, and save it in my freezer until we want some.  This was one of those nights.  The fish was advertised as "haddock fillets, $3.29/lb", but when I asked at the store, I had to buy $20 worth of fish: 6 individually wrapped 1-lb packets, sold in a box for $19.75.  So I bought a whole box, for the sake of the deal.  Fish is normally between $7 and $8 per pound, so this was a really good deal. 

So, to prepare my fish, I run it under cold water until I can peel off the plastic wrapper, but the fish itself is still frozen.  If you are under water conservation guidelines, you can thaw it in the microwave or in a pot of water.  I mix generic unseasoned bread crumbs (you can also make your own by toasting bread, then putting it in a blender) with old bay seafood seasoning.  I put 1 egg for every pound of fish in the right bowl, cut the fish into "fish stick" sized pieces, and put them in the "egg" bowl.  Coat the fish in raw egg, then coat the fish/egg in crumbs/seasoning.  This will get your fingers very messy.  Any unused egg, which usually has some small pieces of raw fish in it, can be stirred in with the crumbs and be molded into "crab cakes" (minus the actual crab).  My mom always called them "hush puppies", and gave them to the dog.  My kids like them well enough, but aren't crazy about them. 

The fish sticks and hush puppies can now be deep fried.  I served these with french fries (also deep fried, not baked, because, hey, my fryer is already on) and applesauce.  The fries I purchased bulk from Best Buy Foods (across from Charles Cole Hospital on Rte 6) so I can only guess that I used roughly $1 worth of fries, and the applesauce was $2.65 for 3 pounds; we ate about half the container.  So my cost for tonight was $3.29 worth of fish, $1.33 worth of applesauce, $1 worth of fries, and maybe $1 worth of bread crumbs and eggs, for a grand total of

$6.62