If someone is cooking fish and there is a southerner involved, you know that fish traditionally will be fried. While fried fish is NOT the healthiest choice around, sometimes you just have to give in to your inner Southerner and make it!
In the south when it comes to frying fish, like Shakespeare might have said if he was from North Carolina, "The breading is the thing."
If a southerner is frying up a mess a' fish that breading will involve cornmeal.
Everyone has their own ratio of meal to flour that they prefer....some even fore go the flour altogether and bread in straight cornmeal.
I also love one of the quintessential southern side dishes that goes with fried fish....hush puppies! That slightly sweetened, oniony ball of fried dough takes me back to my youthful days. Nothing beats a good puppy....
But fried fish and fried hush puppies are just too much fried for my old clogging arteries.
Here is how I get the taste of both with half the grease....
I use hush puppy mix to bread my fish!
This simple yet elusive taste combination was borne out of neccessity. One night as I went to bread some fish for frying, I discovered I was out of cornmeal..oh the horrors! I didn't even have one of those handy little boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix to substitute for the missing ingredient.
But I remembered I had a bag of hush puppy mix, which is basically cornmeal and flour with some spices and a touch of sugar.
So I used the puppy mix for my breading.
Let me tell you, it was a taste of heaven!
And not only was it a great way to get BOTH taste treats and a grease & calorie reducing move(since I only consumed 1 fried item, not 2)but it was a time saver too since I didn't also have to make the hush puppies.lol
Sluggy
I was probably close to adulthood before I realized people ate fish that wasn't fried...LOL!
ReplyDeleteGreat idea to use the HP mix for the fish breading. I'll have to try it.