Citizen Science: Week 3

 I'm doing my best not to fall behind my weekly review of the new fish species I've been trying out for the Eating with the Ecosystem project, but there are some weeks that are just too busy for much review. I was traveling last weekend, so we had to find and cook our fish during the week, in between work, workouts, my volunteer shift at the food pantry, and various other events. Luckily for me, my fish this week was hake. White Hake, to be exact: a simple, small white fish that you never seem to see in grocery stores, but that's every bit as good as tilapia or cod or swai or any other generic whitefish. Except, this hake was fresh from the ocean, fished off Cape Cod only a couple days before I got around to eating it, so it was far better than a defrosted tilapia. Since it was a weeknight meal, I went for fast and easy fish tacos. I cut the hake fillets into similar-sized pieces (the whole fillets have a thick neck and a much thinner tail, which might've made them difficult to cook whole), dredged them in a mixture of flour and cornmeal with salt and pepper, and pan fried them until crispy. I trolled the freezer and found some pineapple-mango salsa that I freshened up with chopped chives. Then I shredded the only two vegetables I had (carrots and cabbage), tossed them with a little vinegar and fish sauce, and voila! Fish tacos with veggie slaw and tropical salsa. Oh, and a drizzle of sweet chili sauce.
While the flavor of hake is unremarkable (as I would describe most whitefish), the texture was undeniably superior to other whitefish I've had. This could be because the hake is endowed with a meatier, firmer flake than its brethren, or simply because it was just so darned fresh. Either way, I'd take hake over tilapia any day.