Baked Fish with Sour Cream Sauce on a Mashed Potato Bed: Recipe

Bake your fish instead of fry it and you get to put sour cream sauce on it. Enjoy this; it's easy and tasty, the mashed potatoes are familiar and comforting if you are new to cooking fish in ways besides frying it. That's my new oval baking dish; just right for this meal for two. Pick a nice solid whitefish like cod or swai. Reluctant to try the fish called "swai," it turned out I loved it.

Fish with Sour Cream-Horseradish Sauce on a Mashed Potato Bed

2 large potatoes, peeled and sliced
1 8 to12 ounce fillet of white fish (I used swai)
2 garlic cloves, pressed or minced
salt and ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup sour cream (lowfat, or regular; your choice)
2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 tablespoon dried dill
1/2 to 1 cup chopped scallions

Rinse the fish and pat it dry, or else it'll steam, not bake. Boil the potatoes until tender, drain and mash with the garlic, and add salt and pepper to taste. 

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a baking dish with cooking spray or lightly coat with oil and put the mashed potatoes in it. Put the fillet on top of the mashed potatoes. Then drizzle the fillet with lemon juice. Put the sour cream, horseradish and dill into a small bowl and combine, then spread it evenly over the fish. Sprinkle the top with the scallions. Cover and bake for about 35 minutes and then serve.

Secrets of a Slim(mer) Midwesterner

A long spell of 100+-degree weather forces me to grocery shop at night, when most folks are home watching the 10 o'clock news, and I find that while the fish and butcher counters are closed after 9 p.m. they've packaged up what didn't sell that day and sell it for cheap. This is handy because after many years of making and eating pastas and homemade breads those now just make me gain belly weight visible the very next day, and I have shifted to raw vegetables and lean proteins, including an egg at  breakfast and lots more fish. This being Missouri, the Walmart doesn't even have a seafood counter, so I go to the name grocery that's open 24 hours, and am trying all sorts of their on-sale offerings like this pound of breaded sole fillets here, and skewered shrimp, and The Piehole is also learning to grill hunks of beef, so far successfully. (Chicken has never struck me as being as healthy and tasty as people say it is, so I never buy or eat it unless somebody else cooked it first.) I also bought tonight a fatless hunk of select-grade London broil for $7 that will feed six people, $4 off normal price. And for lunch I had one three-ounce burger of organic ground-beef raised in California, MO. Just halted all that bread and pasta and suddenly I have a waistline again.