I know some of you saw the heading and embodied the “Blink 182 WTF” meme. I probably roped you in with the “Chilean Sea Bass and cream sauce” but left you wondering why hush puppies. Because I wanted hush puppies. Nothing more than that. And to celebrate our 400th post (401 to be exact) – I bring you traditional ForensicBBQ fare: Fancy sounding dish, yet so very relatable.
Long John Silvers wasn’t only visited during Lent in the ForensicBBQ household growing up. It was a staple. I visited one of our last locations a few years back, and – I’m sorry LJS – it didn’t hold up. But I always enjoyed a hush puppy and wanted to make my own, so we’re doing that first. Then we’re coming back and making a more traditional dinner fare, some seafood. And some damn good seafood at that.
Hush Puppies
And not just any hushpuppies, we’re throwing some diced jalapeno in there because I can’t help myself.
Mix up that cornmeal and flour batter with some seasonings and let’s make some batter balls. These aren’t supposed to be fancy, they’re meant to be comfortable. Familiar, and that’s exactly what they were.
Sure, an actual ice cream scoop or similar probably would’ve been better or more uniform, but a spoon and a gloved finger to push it into the oil worked just as fine. I had a lot of these as they were resting.
Now that we got the redneck side dish out of the way, let’s get a little bit fancier.
Sea Bass
We’re going to make an awesome cream sauce to go along with this. We’re going to cook down some spinach, throw some flavor in there in the form of shallots cheese, tomato and garlic, and use that for our asparagus and fish.
Once everything is cooked down and fragrant, we just have to cook it down, reduce it until it’s a thicker sauce. We don’t want to chew it, but we want to add some flavorful texture to our meal. I used an asparagus sprig to stir it every so often and this resulted in eating a lot of asparagus (on top of eating a lot of hush puppies). By the time the fish going to be done, my hunger will have subsided.
Nothing crazy with the asparagus seasoning, just some veggie grill or similar until it’s softened.
We’re going to throw some Old Bay on the fish and some of that ForensicBBQ cajun seasoning. Want to develop a little bit of crust, but seeing as the Chilean Sea Bass was $24, I wanted to actually taste the fish and not the season so much.
225F until about 140F and that fish will be ready to go. This thing looked great – was hoping it would taste just as good.
Threw some sauce on top with some of MrsForensicBBQ’s microgreens and took a bite and was blown away. You’ve never seen a Sea Bass post on here, because I can’t recall ever having it before. This particular weekend was in the 90F degree range, so between the smoker, the deep frying, it was a sweaty mess and was hoping it was all worth it. One bite later and I knew it was.