Fish tacos with salsa and avocado

In December, between the 21st (Walt's birthday feast) and the 25th (the Christmas feast), we really need something spicy and tasty to eat that doesn't seem too heavy. Yesterday, that turned out to be fish tacos. I'm not even sure where the idea came from. Walt might have mentioned it first.

We had fish left over from the soupe de poissons we made a couple of weeks ago. It was frozen Alaska pollock, a fairly neutral white fish, in fillets. I found a recipe on Simply Recipes, Elise Bauer's site. She's in Sacramento, California, and the recipes she posts are unfailingly good. Here also is a French recipe that's similar.

These were soft tacos, the kind we used to enjoy in San Francisco way back when. They're full of fresh ingredients, including a tomato-pepper-garlic salsa that has some sting to it. Ours was a pico de gallo that I made last fall, when we were overwhelmed by a bumper crop of tomatoes from the garden. I had put a few containers of salsa in the freezer.

I thawed some fish fillets, dried them off, and sprinkled them with hot pepper, chili powder, and ground cumin. Then I sauteed them briefly in olive oil in a big skillet. I also sliced an onion and sauteed that briefly in olive oil, with no salt so that the onion would retain some crunch and just brown a little bit. Here's the cooked fish:

I cut up some roasted red bell peppers (poivrons rouges) out of a jar, and a fresh avocado. To keep the avocado from going brown, I squeezed a fresh lime over it. Lime juice is a flavor you want with Mexican-style food. The other ingredients in the tacos were iceberg lettuce and fresh cilantro a.k.a. coriander. We each made up our own tacos at the table.

We used small corn tortillas (Mexican tortillas, not the Spanish tortilla, which is a potato omelet). We can buy corn or wheat tortillas at the supermarket nowadays  — the supermarket chains have their own brands and they're good. We heated the tortillas up very quickly in the same non-stick skillet that I had cooked the onion and fish in. As for salsa, you can of course buy it in jars at the supermarket, or you can make your own with either fresh or canned tomatoes.

The pico de gallo salsa is very easy to make, by the way, because you just have to roughly chop some fresh or tinned tomatoes, hot chili peppers, onion, garlic, and herbs, put everything in a pitcher or other tall container, and blitz it all quickly with a stick blender. If it's too liquid, pour it into a fine-mesh strainer and let the liquid drain off. Don't throw it away though. Freeze it for later use in soups or sauces.

Along with the lime juice, I think a little dash of hot-pepper vinegar adds good punch to the taco. We put a lot of jalapeño, cayenne, and banana peppers up in vinegar in years when we have a good crop, and we save the vinegar for uses like this after the peppers are gone. The hot pepper vinegar is good with beans like black-eyed peas and with greens like collards.