fish roast / meen varuval

My mom makes excellent fish kuzhambu and fries. Almost all saturdays my mom used to buy fish from a meenkarar ( fish vendor). The whole area people knew that he sold fish for higher price but still everyone bought fish from him as he was the only fish vendor at our place. Otherwise, we had to go to the other end of the city. Also, we liked bargaining with the fish vendor and it was fun. i love fish deep fried in oil ( poricha meen) but this is more oily and we started roasting fish in little oil.

we get many different types of seafood in India and the names vary. In US, we get fish like tuna (soorai meen variety), salmon (viral, i guess!!), tilapia ( ney meen), shark ( sura meen), catfish (kelluthi), sardines( mathi), mackerel (kanageluthi), crab (nandu), eel (vilangu meen). Pomfret (vavval), prawns (semmeen), squid (kanavai)... the list goes on. but here i used tilapia which is soft and gets cooked very fast . Here, the fishes are cleaned, packed and frozen. but still i clean it several times.

Ingredients

• Tilapia fish 5 pieces
• red chilli powder 2tbsp
• fennel seed 1tsp
• black pepper 1tbsp
• garlic 2pods
• salt to taste
• lime juice 1tsp
• coconut oil 5tbsp
• water 1 tbsp

Method

• Grind all the spices red chilli powder, fennelseed, pepper, garlic, salt, lime juice in a mixer along with water. Make it into a thick paste.
• apply the ground masala on the cleaned fish pieces and allow it to marinate for 30 minutes.
• Heat coconut oil in a frying pan and roast the fish pieces for about 3 minutes. Flip the fish pieces so that it gets cooked both sides. flip it gently with a spatula in order to avoid breaking of the fish.
• serve it hot.