What We Cook: Tilapia with Cilantro Pesto ~ page 188

Our Cookbook Blog

Our Cookbook ~ What We Cook, is a compilation of every recipe we (Janice and Carissa) cook - recipes from our cookbook collections, our recipe boxes, and our heads! We set up this blog for friends and family who have our cookbook to let them see pictures we post of the recipes in the book, and also for us to note any corrections, revisions, or additions to What We Cook. We encourage people who are cooking our recipes to let us know how the recipes turn out and any suggestions they might want to make.

In addition, we will be sharing some of our new recipes (along with pictures) that are not in our cookbook. We hope you will help us out and test recipes and give us your comments.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Tilapia with Cilantro Pesto ~ page 188

This is my favorite way to serve tilapia. I am so glad my friend Deborah introduced me to this. This tilapia looks and tastes very special. I tried making the pesto up a day in advance, and it keeps perfectly fine, covered in the fridge, until you are ready to use it. (Watch tomorrow for how I used my leftover pesto.)

You don't have to pull off every leaf for this recipe. A few stems are fine. I just cut the bottom off the washed bunch of cilanto, then pull out a few more obvious stems.

Now it is ready to be dumped into the food processor.

Anytime I use a lemon, I always just grate a little of the zest too, even if the recipe does not call for zest--it just seems a shame not to. At the last minute, I realized I only had half the required amount of nuts though, so I reduced the olive oil also, thinking I might not need as much of it then, and it worked out fine. (This is a very forgiving recipe.)

Here is the beautiful pesto. The food processor does magic on all that cilantro.

Spread it on the tilapia kind of thick. I like to hold back some of the fresh pesto to put on after the fish bakes too, as the green darkens a bit in the oven.