Last night I served this and to a person everyone loved it. I have made it many times and it always goes over well. This recipe will make you look like a "real" cook but it is silly simple. It could translate into the backcountry although I had never tried it there. Instead I just wanted to pass it on to my friends here at QJ.

grab a pack of fish out of the freezer or off the ice

Crush potato chips fine until you have a couple of cups or so. I get the cheapest, saltiest, greasiest ones I can find. They don't have to be pulverized......I use my hand or the bottom of a stout cup.

Use about 1.5 cups of shredded parmesan cheese. Mix with chips. (not quite a 50/50
mix)

Melt 3 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Get this ratio correct. To much lemon juice is no good.

Dip the fish into the lemon butter and into the chip/cheese mixture and lay into the bottom of a 6x9 baking dish. I like glass and I put down a little spray first.

Take the leftover chips and cheese mixture and sprinkle liberally on top.

Bake at 350 or 375 for 1/2 hour or 45 min or until the chip mixture just starts to crisp up a bit. It won't really get crispy brown but it won't be soggy either.

The funny part about the whole thing is that nobody can figure out what you have used. The first question I get is always........"how did you make this" :question

Couple it with these baked potatoes:
Cut the baker in half lengthwise
add a few pats of butter to one facing
sprinkle some garlic salt on
add a thin slice of onion on top of butter
put tater back together
wrap a slice of bacon around it
wrap in foil and bake longer than you think I like 350 for 2 hours but I use whopper taters. Again simple and quick but mighty tatsty

BTW Put the tater in something as opposed to laying it directly on a wire rack just in case of a little spillage.   

solotripper wrote on Jan 5^th, 2011 at 4:03pm:


But oh baby.......It's so good!!

Besides, once every couple of months shouldn't be to bad............ it might even be good for you .

MT,
I'm just looking out for you buddy

Let's start with the positives.
Fish and potatoes are two of the healthiest things you can eat.
The other things are the issue.

Your on the right track. Baked low salt chips are lower in fat. Considering that the Parmesan cheese has salt, plus the garlic salt and bacon in the baked potato, your getting a lot of salt and saturated fat in one meal.

I'd give the baked/low salt chips a try at first.
If your really willing to try something, use crushed corn flakes or tater buds seasoned with a good no salt seasoning. This should give you the crunch your looking for. The softer the cheese, the more fat. Buying a premium Parmesan in a chunk, and shredding/grating yourself, is better than the pre-shredded in the plastic bags. A way to cut back on cheese is to go for flavor over quantity. A good Romano cheese is very flavorful but you can use way less. Works the same in healthy homemade pizza.
I'll give you your butter with lemon for your fish dip, but let's do something about your baked potato.

Instead of butter on baked potato, drizzle with some good olive oil.
Instead of garlic salt, roast some garlic cloves and squeeze the garlic out on one side before you top with onion. Bacon has plenty of salt, but
If you poke a few holes in foil, and bake on a raised rack, the bacon will crisp up and the excess fat will run out.

You can always add a little SEA salt if you need it or a good Mrs Dash type salt free seasoning if you think it's to bland. Remember, it's easier to add more salt, than take it out

These changes alone will make you recipe a lot healthier and I doubt anyone will no it's " healthy". The secret of cooking healthy food is adding more spices to make up for the fat, which carries flavor. I also recommend NEVER telling anyone your making a low-fat/healthy dish
It just raises mental barriers. Once there smacking their lips and asking for the recipe, you can drop the low fat/healthy bomb, by then they've bought into the idea that good taste and healthy don't have to be mutually exclusive

Sounds like a lot of salt and fat to me too. But as someone who falls into the "lives to eat" category (as opposed to the "eats to live" one), here's my take:

Personal tastes differ, and the people who use a lot of salt in their cooking usually do so because they like the taste. It's what they grew up with, and what they're used to. So substituting spices for salt does require some mindset adjustment, but it's a step in the right direction.

When I'm buying salt, I just buy the cheapest kind. Not sea salt, not kosher salt, not extra-virgin salt hand-picked by selected virgins, just cheap ordinary salt. If you don't believe they're all basically the same, blind-taste-test them and see.

I would be careful about "no-salt" seasonings. Labelling laws in North America are pretty lax, so you could end up with something containing MSG or who-knows-what. Just cut back, and learn to appreciate the taste of the fish instead the taste of the salt.

Fresh Parmesan is unfortunately even better than ST suggests. (The real stuff has "Reggiano-Parmegiano" in dotted letters on the rind). The problem is that fresh Parmesan is such a good eating cheese, when you're grating it, the tendency is to cut chunks off the block and stuff them into your mouth. It tastes even better if you have a glass of wine in front of you. (You see where this is leading.)

Dipping the fish into butter/LJ before breading sounds interesting. I'd normally use beaten egg white + water, but maybe I'll give this one a try. Another really easy fish recipe is dust fish fillets in flour+salt+pepper, fry, meanwhile cook butter in small saucepan til it starts to brown, remove from heat and add LJ (or better fresh lemon chunks, no peel) and a couple of tbsp of capers, serve w fish. Here, the sourness of the capers makes up for the minimal salt.

Try to get away from the use of garlic salt (in anything). If you want garlic, add garlic.  Roasting garlic is delicious. You can pickle garlic too: peel cloves, put them into pickling vinegar in a little jar, and put it into the fridge. That way you never run out. (The taste does change a little, but not enough that it can't be used as a substitute wherever you need it.) Don't worry that the cloves turn a weird green/black color.

Potatoes and cured pork do seem made for each other. But the bacon strips I normally see in the supermarket are 95% fat, and that's beyond even my limit. So what I do, is when I buy a ham (ordinary Costco cooked ham), I make up ziplocks of 100 or 200 g and put them in the freezer. If I need "simulated bacon bits" for potatoes (or spinach salad - yum!), I take out a packet, chop it very finely, and fry it up in a minimum of oil. Similar taste, with almost no fat.

If you want to cut back on butter when frying but hate to give up the taste of butter, try frying in 50-50 butter + oil. You get almost all of oil's higher cooking temperature, and don't lose much butter flavor.

Now I'm hungry. Too lazy to start roasting garlic, but there's a block of Parmesan in the fridge ... no wait ... there's leftover pizza with roast garlic on it as well .. I'm outta here  

I never use cooking spray, but ran across this post on the Freakonomics site, and pass it along without verification:

"My favorite is how cooking spray will always say “Fat Free”, when it’s essentially a can of pure fat. It turns out you can list 0g of fat if your serving size makes the fat turn out to be less than 1g.

What is the serving size? 1/3 seconds of spray (or .226g). I want to see someone try to cook their eggs with that little oil in the pan."  (posted by dickgrogan on Jan 4 under the Freakshots topic of the same date)