Haddock & Tintin Dinner Special

I've always liked the idea of making fish for dinner, but since my experience with cooking fish has primarily involved fish of the frozen variety, I've never really liked the reality of fish for dinner. Took me two and a half years to realize that, hey, living in the Greater Boston area probably means fresh fish at the market, and now that I've had that realization, I'm, uh, kind of obsessed with cooking fish.

(Read: we've had fish every night for the past four nights and will totally have it tomorrow and all the days after unless the promised snowstorm materializes and subjects us to leftover pizza, breakfast sausages, and gumbo.)

(... there are far, far worse fates than that, don't get me wrong)

This is my third variety of fish-dish, but it's my own creation, kind of, a Frankenstein's recipe if you will, and it is so ridiculously good that everyone should try it.

Right now.

Shoo.

Haddock & Tintin Dinner Special

Ingredients

1 large sweet potato

1 decent head of broccoli's worth of florets

1/2 tbsp butter

Homemade Cajun seasoning, which is:

- 1/2 tsp garlic powder

- 3/4 tsp paprika

- 1/4 tsp black pepper

- 1/4 tsp onion salt

- 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

- 1/4 tsp oregano

- 1/4 tsp dry thyme
~2 tbsp olive oil

1/2 lb haddock (any whitefish will do, really, should be boneless, skin doesn't matter)

Instructions

- Peel and slice the sweet potato into 1/2" pieces, then quarter those pieces.

- Steam them for ~5ish minutes (until they're mashable). Steam the broccoli at the same time, but give it more like 10-15 minutes.

- While those are steaming, put together your Cajun seasoning. Spread it out on a small plate.

- Pat the fish dry and cut it into pieces maybe 2-3" long and 2-4" wide. They won't really be even. We usually cut the fish up so that we have an even number of pieces and don't have to have battle over who gets what piece of fish.

- Rub each piece of fish with the seasoning. This is kind of like a lazy version of Shake 'n Bake. Mostly, just all of the pieces evenly coated (don't be too detailed about this; it's more art than science).

This is the part where it's nice to have two cooks in the kitchen. If you don't, then just do your best.

- Take the potatoes out of the steamer and mash the daylights out of them. Add the pat of butter and make sure it's mixed in. Leave the broccoli alone for another few minutes, at least.

- Start heating your olive oil on medium-high heat in a small skillet. This is for the fish.

- Separate the mashed potatoes into two servings and cover, if you can, to keep them warm.

- Fry up the fish in the now-hot oil. My pan accommodates 3 pieces at a time, so I do my frying in two stages. Fry the fish for 1 minute per each side (2 minutes total).

- Serve onto the mashed sweet potatoes after the second side is done cooking.

- Remember that there's broccoli cooking, curse under your breath, and serve it on the side.

Voila! Dinner!

(In case the joke's lost on ye, Haddock is the name of Tintin's sidekick in The Adventures of Tintin, and since Tintin's a ginger (orange hair) and sweet potatoes are orange ... yeah okay, I'll stop trying to be funny now. I'll see myself out.)