Fish tacos, Baja Minnesota style

We spent the day spent soaking up the sun, scenery, gorgeous breeze and fabulous people watching along with 30,000 fans at Spring Creek Motocross park. Motocrossers have the best T-shirts, if they bother to wear them. Dave’s favorite spotted today: Motocross is like showers, if you don’t do it every day, you stink.

Yep. So after a shower to wash away the grit, it was time for some fish tacos, our way.

Ingredients

Firm fish fillets (cod works well), figuring two goodish-size fillets will yield enough for 4 to 6 tacos

Tacos, warmed up and covered with foil in a 200-degree oven

1 lime, divided 

Toppings:

Grated cabbage, about two tablespoons per taco

Pico de gallo: Mix 4 tomatoes chopped small, 1½ tablespoons chopped jalapeno, ¼ cup chopped onion, juice of half a lime, 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, salt and pepper to taste

White sauce: Mix ½ cup mayo, ½ cup plain yogurt, 1 minced garlic clove, ½ cup fresh tomato salsa, two large tomatoes chopped small, 2 tablespoons chopped onion

Guacamole: Mix two peeled, pitted and roughly mashed avocados, 1 clove minced garlic, juice of half a lime, 1 chopped serrano or jalapeno pepper, 2 tablespoons chopped onion, 1 finely chopped medium-size tomato, and salt to taste

The toppings take a while to prepare, so start with them first. Let each one stand at room temperature while you prepare the others. Cover the guacamole until you’re ready to use it so it doesn’t discolor. If you’re feeling lazy and only have time for one of these, make it the pico de gallo.

Warm tacos, cover with foil and keep warm on a plate at the lowest oven setting. Sprinkle fish fillets with the juice of half a lime and grill until fish flakes easily (using a grill rack helps keep fish from falling through the grate). Pile tacos with fish and dollops of your choice of toppings.  Serve with a wedge of lime along side.

Or what the heck – dip the fish in cornmeal batter and fry it. Or just heat oil in a skillet and pan-fry the fish. Either way, you’ve got yourself the start of a fish taco, and then the toppings take it from there.

The white sauce is the closest I’ve found to the concoction they put on your standard fish taco in a San Diego restaurant without pretensions (no uppity pineapple-mango salsa). Since we don’t get to our favorite Ocean Beach taco source very often, we needed something to get us a fix. You don’t need a super ton of this per taco.

The guac is essentially Rick Bayless’ guacamole picado. The pico de gallo is essentially Martha Stewart’s.  The mix of all three, that’s essentially Baja Minnesota. If you don’t know where that is, well, you’re not from there.

Oh, and a big shout out to the home-town boys for making a good show of it at the track today, and to La Crescent Wine and Spirit for stepping up and sponsoring the national. That place is now officially on one of our road trip destination stops.