Fantastically Foolproof Fish

Soooo it's been FOREVER since I've made a posting.  Things have been crazy around here with school lesson plans to write, my own grad school research projects to complete, and housing renovations in the works.  Sadly, that meant that my poor little blog has been left on the back burner.... Hopefully, I'll be able to keep up with postings so I can share all of the yummy recipes I've been trying out!

Sometimes you want a simple and yummy meal.  I was watching the food channel and they were making fish en papillote.  This seemed pretty easy and I needed a fast dinner for me and the hubby.  This is a really simple, healthy, and tasty dish that you should definitely try!

Fish en Papillote

 

* 1 zucchini

* 1/2 red bell pepper

* 1/4 red onion

* 2 cloves minced garlic

* 1 cup sliced button mushrooms

* 2 sole fillets

* 2 tbs grass fed butter

* 2 lemon slices

* 1 tbs white wine

* 1 tsp thyme (fresh is best)

The first thing I did was to julienne all of the vegetables.  I don't know that this is a necessary step, but I think that all of the vegetables cook better and more evenly when they are the same size. 

I will say that when I did this, I had put all of the vegetables in when they were all raw.  When it was finished, the onions were still pretty raw since they take a bit longer to cook through.  There was just a lot of bite to the onion in the dish.  I recommend slightly sauteeing the onions first or else cut them REALLY thin. 

I threw all of the veggies into a bowl and tossed them with the thyme, then added a bit of salt and pepper.

I cut 2 pieces of aluminum foil to a size that would be enough to fold some of the foil over the fish.  I put 1 piece of fish on each piece of foil.

Then, I covered each fillet of fish completely with the veggies.  I like having a lot of veggies with my meal, so, as you can see, the veggies totally cover the fish.  I put a lemon slice and a little bit more of the thyme on the very top.  

Then, I added in a little dollop of butter and 1/2 tbs of the white wine to each packet, just to give it a little extra flavor.

After everything was assembled, I rolled the foil down and sealed it so that all of the steam from the wine, fish, and lemon juice would get trapped and give some extra flavor to the fish.  Don't these look like giant Chipotle burritos? haha

I had the oven preheated to 375, and threw the fish packets in for only about 12 minutes.  The fish is very thin, so it doesn't take long to cook through at all.  One nice thing is that you don't have to worry about overcooking the fish.  Obviously, you don't want to keep it in the oven for too long, but since its basically steaming, it's hard to really mess up!  Thus my title Foolproof Fish!

I let the fish packets sit for a few minutes just to cool down a bit.  If you open the packets right after you take them out of the oven, you could end up with a pretty bad steam burn!

 

So here's the fish in a dish for you to eat when you wish ( sorry, I teach elementary school and every once in a while, the Dr. Seuss has to come out!)  Anyway, the fish was really, really good! It was so incredibly simple (you can even buy frozen julienned veggies to help make your job even easier!).  It had a nice flavor, it was very good! 

Like I mentioned above, the only thing that I wasn't a huge fan of was the fact that the veggies and fish were all cooked, but the onions were still a little bit raw, giving the whole thing a bite.  I love onions, but I think that when you have such a tender fish, the flavors all have to be pretty light. 

Overall, I'm totally making this dish again.  It was easy, cheap (sole isn't expensive at all), and it was fast!

Enjoy!