If you could cook like me and create quick dishes every night of the week, you’d never need a recipe book. Without a recipe book, you’d never need to stress about dinner. It’s the written recipe that causes so much anxiety about preparing family dinners.
Are you always trying to figure out “what’s for dinner”? Is it a constant battle of finding recipes, sharing recipes, deciding which recipes work and which don’t? Before you start cooking, do you have to search for a recipe first?
If most of your dinners come from a phone book instead of your kitchen cabinets, I want to share the quickest and easiest way to put flavorful meals in front of your family with minimal effort. One of the best ways to do this is to create quick dishes from what is already in your pantry.
Taco Fish is something I made up just minutes before I started cooking it. Peering into my pantry cabinet, I noticed a long forgotten bag of tortilla chips. All the dip-able whole chips had been eaten, leaving the broken pieces and crumbs on the bottom. The lonely bag is just sitting there, waiting for the garbage.
However, along with some flounder filets from the freezer, a half jar of salsa, and shredded cheddar cheese, these nacho chip crumbs can be the inspiration for a new pantry meal, Taco Fish.
Since I have command of the steps necessary in a basic breading procedure, I can dredge the flounder in flour, dip in egg, and coat in the nacho chip crumbs. The breading procedure is the same if using bread crumbs, cracker meal, parmesan cheese, or nacho chips. The flour sticks to the fish, the egg sticks to the flour, and the crumbs stick to the egg. It’s that easy.
It couldn’t be much easier to just top the fish with the jar of salsa and shredded cheese and bake until it’s reached the desired internal temperature. It can be served with a can of refried beans or Spanish rice as accompaniment.
When you use the pantry items you already have on hand, you can create quick dishes for everyday cooking without having to search for recipes, or spend more money at the grocery store. My mission is to empower all people with the basic cooking methods behind recipes so that every food item already in your kitchen is the inspiration for a time and cost saving recipe of your own.
See the Taco Fish quick dishes video in its entirety.
Chef Todd Mohr is a classically trained chef, entrepreneur, cooking educator and founder of WebCookingClasses. You can experience his unique approach to no-recipe cooking with his FREE online cooking classes . The 7 minute class will change the way you think about cooking forever.