Tilapia in the Crock Pot

Fish?  In the crock pot?

Yes, you read that correctly.  Apparently it is possible.  It was a random, undirected path that led me to this recipe.

I spend some time just about every morning (with my coffee, ahhh...) checking out a few of my favorite food blogs, and inevitably one of those blogs links to another blog with reference to some tidbit or other that sounds too good to pass up, so I click on the new blog, which inevitably leads to another blog...

You can see where this is going.  This is why I have close to twenty blogs that I check regularly.  And it's not even November.  Holidays and food blogs?

Yikes.

But to stay focused on the task at hand: by following one blog to another (no idea of the original path anymore), I found this lady that made a name for herself cooking in her crock pot for 365 straight days.  As you can imagine soups, stews, chilies, and roasts would get a bit old after, oh day 80ish I'm guessing, so she had to get pretty creative.  According to her site, you can cook pretty much anything in a crock pot.

It seemed like a good time to try a new way of cooking fish when grilling isn't really an option.   

Enter Tilapia in the Crock Pot.

Recipe: (from A Year of Slow Cooking)
3 or 4 filets of tilapia (or other white fish)
1/4 cup mayonnaise (I used Reduced Fat with Olive Oil)
1/2 cup shredded cheese (cheddar, parmesan  etc.  She suggests parmesan as the tastiest option, which is what I used.)
juice of 2 lemons
4 cloves garlic, chopped
salt and black pepper to taste

Mix mayonnaise, cheese, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and pepper in a bowl.

Lay out a piece of foil - one piece of foil for each piece of fish.  Rub mixture on both sides of fish and lay in foil.

Enclose foil into a packet around fish.  Lay foil packets into crock pot.

Cook on low for 2-4 hours (I cooked mine for 3).

Nutritional Information: (calculated for 16 ounces of tilapia = 4 servings at Spark Recipes)
Calories: 220
Total Fat: 9.7g
     Saturated Fat: 2.9 g
     Monounsaturated Fat: 3.1 g
     Polyunsaturated Fat: 1.1 g
Cholesterol: 69.9 mg
Potassium: 387.5 mg
Sodium: 395.5 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 5.5 g
     Dietary Fiber: 0.2 g
     Sugars: 1.6 g
Protein: 28.1 g

Verdict:
Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should.  Although the flavor of the fish was good (a little tart, a little garlicky), Alex and I both thought that it was a little.... soggy.  There really is no other word for it.  There were pools of liquid in the foil packets.  When I removed the fish from the foil packets, they literally fell apart.  And I probably could have wrung each piece out like a washcloth.  Not my favorite way to eat a piece of fish.  Might I try this recipe again but bake it in the oven?  Possibly.  I think that it would cook a bit dryer anyway.  But I think all future plans of cooking fish in a crock pot have been hereby abandoned.

The best part of the meal?  Making herb roasted butternut squash for the third time this fall!   With a slight twist this time, cinnamon and nutmeg as the seasonings, it made for a delightful almost desserty accompaniment to the meal.

And really, you can't go wrong with a super-food vegetable that tastes like dessert.

I know, I know, there's nothing green on this plate, but we did have salad, so that's something!