Tilapia with Asparagus and Sauce Maltaise

Monday 3 March

Sort of a take on a old dish we used to do lots, called Bundles of Sole (and which we may do again now that Trader Joe's has sole in place of Chinese farm-raised tilapia). In Bundles of Sole, the main thing was the presentation. You boiled the asparagus spears, rolled the sole fillets around them, then practiced fish bondage by tying them up with parboiled strips of scallions. The bundles then got poached in a shallow court bouillon, and served with a hollandaise. Very elegant, but the only disadvantage was that the bundles would always give off a good deal of liquid and make the hollandaise runny.

I wanted to make a sauce maltaise because we had this blood orange in the house, but we used it up to make the fennel and blood orange salad (see below). So made it anyway with just a regular orange; and with the elements just piled on top of one another, no bondage required.

Boiled the asparagus in one pan.
Dipped the tilapia in bread crumbs and fried in the other.
Made the sauce maltaise in the saucier. Sauce maltaise is just hollandaise, but using boiled down orange juice instead of lemon, and topped with orange zest.
Meanwhile, for no good reason, the dam' pilot lights wouldn't spark, so we were moving pans around from burner to burner, all the while igniting matches and yelling "Light, you b@st@rd, you!"
All came out fine: the fishes just done, the asparagus still warm, the sauce rich and creamy.