Tilapia Milanese

I made a bad decision last night. Daniel and I went to the store hungry. And you know what happens when people go to the store hungry? They buy things they shouldn’t. Like a bag of chips. And then they proceed to eat almost the entire bag of chips. Whoopsies.

Meal	Food	Calories
Breakfast	Corn Flakes	100
	Almond Milk	30
Lunch	Fruit Smoothie	180
	Spinach and Fruit Salad	207
Snack	Fiber One Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownie	90
	Chedder & Sour Cream chips	300
Dinner	Another Spinach and Fruit Salad	200
	Tilapia Milanese	626
Drink	Lambrusco	98
Total		1831

We found a tilapia recipe that sounded good. It’s similar to the Almond Crusted Tilapia procedure-wise, but we needed to go to the store for a few ingredients we didn’t have on hand. That’s when we fell into the trap. We were running out of bread. And this recipe calls for SIX slices of bread! So, unfortunately at the store I go to, the bread aisle is also the chip aisle. And boy was I hungry. We agreed on the cheddar and sour cream which is my favorite! But once we were home we started eating the chips immediately while watching Despicable Me before we started cooking. We got so distracted by chip eating and movie watching that we ate at least half the bag. I roughly estimated how many chips I ate. It was definitely a couple servings (16 chips per serving). But each chip is a different size, so how do you know what’s accurate?!  Oh and if you haven’t watched Despicable Me, you should! It’s so cute! I haven’t even seen the trailer for the new one but if there’s minions in it I will definitely be seeing it.

Ok, so Tilapia Milanese. This recipe calls for 6 oz filets and ours were only 4 oz so I adjusted the calories per serving accordingly. We also ended up using just 3 slices of bread. You pulse the bread in a food processor to make crumbs and I just have a small food processor so only 3 slices fit. It turned out to be plenty to cover our four 4 oz filets so we didn’t need to go down that bread/chip aisle after all! Dang it. We adjusted a few more ingredients so I’m giving you the list of what we actually used but you can click the link for the original ingredients.

Ingredients:

4 4-ounce tilapia fillets
1 1/2 cups skim milk
1 cup all-purpose flour
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
2 large eggs
3 slices whole wheat bread (preferrably Sara Lee 45 Cal bread), torn into pieces
1/3 cup fresh parsley leaves
Finely grated zest of 1/2 lemon, plus lemon wedges for serving
4 to 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
6 cups baby arugula Arugula is nasty! You can read about my personal experience here and here.

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Soak the filets in a bowl with the skim milk and 2 cups ice for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the flour with 1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper in a shallow dish (I don’t like adding a lot of salt to my recipes so I always reduce it, unless it’s bread! No salt in bread = yucky). Lightly beat the eggs in another dish. Pulse the bread, parsley, and lemon zest a in a food processor until crumbs form, then transfer to a third dish.

Line a baking sheet with foil, set aside. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil and and 1 tablespoon of butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Remove two fillets from the milk and dredge in the flour, shaking off the excess. Dip in the eggs, then coat with the breadcrumbs, gently pressing to coat both sides. Transfer to skillet and cook until golden, about 3 minutes per side. Then transfer them on to the baking sheet. Repeat with the last two filets, adding the rest of the olive oil and butter.  Once all filets are on the the baking sheet place them in the oven to bake until cooked through, about 8 minutes.

Serve the fish with a lemon wedge.

Pretty simple! I loved the lemon zest in the bread crumbs. You could taste it after being cooked but I like a little more lemon so I added a few squeezes of juice to the top of mine. Then we made our second Spinach & Fruit salad for the day to go along with the fish.

As for working out yesterday, I went on a 3.5 mile run with Daniel. I wanted to go another mile but Daniel was really hungry by that point so we called it a day. When I got home I did a lot of stretching and 20 push-ups! My arms were so tired after that. I need to start doing push-ups more often so I get stronger. I was wanting to incorporate more strength training into my workouts but I’ve been too lazy lately. I need to get back to doing the Five Day Workout Plan. Maybe when school starts and I have access to all the weights at the gym I’ll start it up again.

Here’s the links for each day: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5

Anybody try a new fish recipe or incorporate something new into your workouts?