Cooking Failures, How to Bounce Back from Them, and the Simplest Baked Fish Nuggets
This week was a week of kitchen failures for me. I was working on developing three new recipes to share with you in the coming weeks and two of them definitely did not go as planned. The frustration was real. Here I was, working in a time crunch, trying to take advantage of the little time I had to produce dishes that were tasty and easy and they just weren’t going as planned. I tried to be flexible, tried to find variations or tweaks that would work, wracked my brains to think of how to fix these disasters, but it just wasn’t happening. So I swallowed my pride, accepted defeat, and moved on. Don’t get me wrong, these are recipes I am determined to master and to be able to share with you soon, but it became clear to me as I was growing increasingly frustrated that the time was not right.
Sometimes cooking is like that. It is frustrating and does not go as planned. Mistakes are made and we have to accept defeat and move on. The trick, though, is that moving on in that moment doesn’t mean that we give up on cooking overall, it means that we accept that the time is not right but trust that it will go better another time. Sometimes that means going back to the basics and making something that you are comfortable with, whether that is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a favorite go-to recipe and, let’s be honest, sometimes that means literally stepping out of the kitchen and ordering a pizza. Either way, the important thing is to not give up entirely.
So this week, after my fiasco cooking adventures I decided to go back to basics and I was really glad I did because I ended up putting the finishing touches on a really simple recipe that I get to share with you today: the simplest breaded fish recipe ever.
This recipe is so easy and so versatile. This week I did a Mexican spin on it and we had fish tacos for dinner, but it also can be a great meal with some simple sides and ketchup to dip, or you could even do fish sandwiches. So even if my first recipes crashed and burned, this recipe is a keeper that I think you will really enjoy adding to your rotation.
Simplest Baked Fish Nuggets
Ingredients
- 1 lb tilapia filets any white fish in a thinly sliced filet would work well
- 1 cup whole wheat bread crumbs
- 1 teaspoon oregano
- 1 teaspoon chili powder
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon garlic powder
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 425. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Cut the fish filets into small pieces, about 1 to 1 ½ inches in length. On a dinner plate, mix the breadcrumbs and spices. Dip each fish piece into the bread crumbs, coating well, and place them on the baking sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes.
