Fish Sticks

American Entree

FISH STICKS

INGREDIENTS

1 pound cod or pollock
2 eggs
½ teaspoon grated lemon rind
¼ teaspoon salt
1⅓ cups panko (Japanese bread crumbs)
no-stick spray

SPECIAL UTENSIL

baking sheet

Makes 24 fish sticks. Takes 30 minutes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Fish sticks imitating a doughnut

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Put cod and ice water in bowl. Put bowl in refrigerator until oven is ready.

Drain water from bowl. Pat fish dry with towel. Cut cod into sticks 3″ long and 1″ wide. Add egg to mixing bowl. Beat eggs with whisk until well blended. Add lemon rind and salt to mixing bowl. Whisk again. Immerse fish sticks in egg/lemon rind mix until well coated. Add panko to second mixing bowl. Dredge coated fish sticks through panko.

Spray baking sheet with no-stick spray. Arrange fish sticks evenly on baking sheet. Bake at 450 degrees for about 12-to-15 minutes or until fish sticks obtain the desired level of crispiness.

TIDBITS

1) Oral tradition has Lucy, the world’s first human asking her husband, Oldivai George for a doughnut. George didn’t understand this craving; he didn’t have the doughnut-needing gene, the one mutation that would make him fully human.

3) But he was a devoted husband. He searched near and far, in this universe and in the parallel one where socks missing from our dryers would eventually end up. After many moons, he admitted defeat and came home with a wooly mammoth.

4) Lucy put her hands on her hips and glared. “A mammoth is not a doughnut. It is not even a nut.” “What is dough?” asked George. Lucy didn’t know. Agriculture hadn’t been invented. Neither had culinary schools. The couple went doughnutless. So did their offspring for thousands of generations. In 885 Bjorn Fisk of Norway invented the lutefisk doughnut. It was not a great success for Bjorn; he was burned alive. Then in the mid 18th-century, Elizabeth Gregory, perfected the flour doughnut. Doughnut makers have led long lives ever since.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.