Welcome to another adventure in the Kitchen With Ken and this time around I was in the mood for something akin to fish tacos.  I’ve long been a taco fan but only ever had a fish taco when I went to an area McCormack and Schmidicks restaurant for their Happy Hour.  The particular concoction from the kitchen of PiercingKen is probably only a fish taco in name based on the overall difference.  The rationale behind this was to use some stuff in the fridge so it would not go bad and had a little bit of an idea to make my own little treats.  So wash your hands and help out as I take you through this one, I promise to be brief since this was on the easy side.  You will first need a small pan to bake some of our fish products in.

OK so I realize that I need a new baking pan as this one has clearly served its purpose over the years.  It actually belonged to my Grandmother so there is some small amount of sentimental value was with me when I used it to cook.  Moving on, I could not use the cooking spray as that is not too good for non stick pans which I learned from a friend who should be a gourmet, so I just added a little bit of butter to the pan before putting it into the oven.

I said that I was cheating a little bit and the reason was because I was using the remaining fish sticks and fillets that I had in the freezer.  Summer was coming and I would need the space for ice cream after all.  The larger pieces you see are the Talapia kind while the smaller ones are the standard Fillet patty’s.  I was using Gorton’s brand since I rather like them.  Since I was making two tacos out of this I used five of the smaller sized pieces I had at hand.

The idea for this also came to me when I passed the box of the Old El Paso Taco Kit and since I had not used one of these in a very long time, I decided to give it a go for this little experiment.   I liked how this also came with both hard shell and soft shell tacos.  This would be my very first time trying to do the both of them together.  I admit I was up for the challenge.

Lettuce pray (I’m sorry, could not resist), so here is my veggies for the recipe.  A decent sized head of lettuce and a single tomato.  I will not use all of them by a long shot and instead save the rest for a salad to be had later in the week.

A taco needs cheese and who does not love the cheddar stuff so I grated up a little bit of a bar and was left with what you see in the photo above.  By the way, our fish sticks and pieces are currently cooking and we are about ten minutes into the process so I guess it would be a smart time to turn them over and let them brown on the other side.  So here we find our taco “containers”, two corn and doughy goodies that will soon be loaded with other tasty stuff.  The idea is to wrap the hard shell taco with the soft shell one and of course to keep it intact and not break it……

My next photo shows the success I had at not breaking my hard shell taco.  Oh well.  I was still going to eat it.  You can also see that I decided to lay those broken pieces on top of the lettuce which was now layered between the hard and soft shell tacos.  I felt this would work out nicely for my needs and I was correct.

I didn’t bother with a lot of tomato as we were not really dealing with optimum space in this little crevice so just a small amount would suffice.

My hot sauce of choice was an official Old El Paso salsa sauce in medium for hotness.  I love the spicy aspect but I find that these sauces are too hot on their “fire” versions.  I did wish I had a bottle of my friend Pete’s homemade hot sauce but I did not.

Another shot of everything just waiting for the fish part………

Make sure not to overcook the fish stick things as they are rather tough when you do that.  I think these took about twenty minutes to get to the proper texture I wanted

I clearly misjudged my sizes of the fish fillets and sticks but that was okay, I could make a mess on my own and deal with it later.  This was an experiment after all and a lesson for the mental cookbook.

I now added on the shredded cheddar cheese and realized that I had cut too much of the stuff.  Oh well, I would just have to deal with that.  I didn’t show you the image of the whole shebang with the sauce on it so please forgive me.

I admit that this looks a little messier than it probably should have but in the end this really worked out well as a relatively quick and tasty recipe.  I’m not one of the “fussy eaters” and am open to a lot of things so I can safely say that this was good and will likely be made again if I find myself with the proper ingredients.  It’s not a “true fish taco” by definition as I had mentioned, but since I had all of these ingredients in the house I decided use them and compose something for the readers of the blog to indulge in and perhaps inspire to do something similar.   I think that cooking is a fun discovery and one that more people should indulge in more often.  Dining out is nice, but there is something so rewarding about making stuff yourself.  Even simple silly things like this.