Blackened Catfish Recipe with Eggplant!

Let's make my blackened catfish steaks with pan seared eggplant and a tomato lemon garlic sauce. Yum. Oh, I can't wait to taste it. Let me sop that sauce up. Oh my goodness. This is filled with flavor. Let's get it. We are going to start by slicing the eggplant. This is a mini eggplant because I'm making a single serving size. So I am going to slice these in one half inch circles. I love eggplant. You really have to work a little hard to get that texture right. But once you learn how to cook it and you get that texture right, you'll fall in love with it. We're going to slice them. Nice thick half inch slices. Oh, I don't want to waste that. Let me just cut the little booty off. And all we're going to do is salt both sides. And what the salt does is it brings out the moisture. So we're going to get the moisture to come to the surface in these beautiful eggplant. We're just going to let these sit for 30 minutes. While these are getting all comfortable with the salt, we're going to season our catfish. Here are my catfish steaks. I love catfish steaks and I prefer these to catfish fillets because these are meatier and they're juicier. So if you want to compare like light meat to dark meat, this will kind of be like that. To me, the fillets, although the fillets are good, they're a little drier texture. These steaks right here, they're meaty and juicy and just full of flavor. So if you haven't tried catfish steaks but you like catfish, try catfish steaks. I want these to have a kind of blackened flavor or like a Cajun flavor, but instead of using the pre-mixed Cajun spice, I like to do my own. If you look at the ingredients in those Cajun spices or the pre-mixed spices, a lot of them has sugar. I don't want to add any sugar to this. So if you want to make your own, all you got to do is just look at the ingredients and use the same ingredients. For these steaks, we're going to start with some salt. We're doing this on both sides. Some black pepper. I love catfish. Catfish is my favorite fish, by the way. And you know, you got to have them fried, but you want to switch it up a little bit. So this is when you want something nice and light, but still hearty. All right, salt, pepper, garlic powder. Of course, of course, we're going to do some smoked paprika. That's going to give it that beautiful red blackened color and just a little bit, a little hint of red pepper. Just a dab will do you because this works and it's hot. Make sure it's all coated and I'm going to do the other side. Let me show you a trick. With the catfish steaks, they're so thick, you got to do the sides too, right? So instead of having to season all four sides separately, what I do is when I'm seasoning, I hold it up high and there's going to be seasoning is going to fall in between the cracks. Now with that leftover seasoning, it's not going to go to waste because I am going to roll the catfish in that seasoning, the sides of it so we can get all that. We gots to get all that. None of that goes to waste. So let me demonstrate for those of you that, you know, it's kind of like, what? What's she talking about rolling? Huh? What do you mean? Let me demonstrate for you. Let me hit it with that. Just a dab. Just a dab of that because it's hot. Now that extra seasoning right there. Oh, don't worry about it. Don't even worry about it because we're going to take this. We're going to go ahead and pick that up. You know, we're going to go ahead and pick that up on all sides. Now it's seasoned on all sides. Bam! What? While our fish is getting to room temperature and the seasonings are kind of soaking in and our eggplant is getting all nice and juicy, we're going to work on this tomato basil lemon sauce. It's going to be absolutely scrumptious. So you're going to start with some grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes. And I am actually going to quarter these. So I'm going to cut them in fourths because they're going to cook down and be nice and delicious. I don't really like taking huge bites of tomato. That's just my preference. And when you slice them down or you dice them and then you saute them, they get to a beautiful consistency and it's going to make our sauce scrumptious. So I'm going to quarter these tomatoes. The other ingredients we need for our sauce is garlic. I have fresh garlic here that I diced earlier. And I also have some roasted garlic. I've made some roasted garlic tomato soup the other day and I had so much left. I'm going to use some of this in here. It's going to bring a little smokiness to it that's going to match the smoked paprika that's on the catfish. Hello, we got to marry these flavors. We got to mirror flavors. We're also going to need some lemon juice, fresh lemon, fresh lemon. And I have chopped some basil or basil. And we're going to use butter. Typically with the fish I'm going to fry. I will fry that in butter for like the blackened flavor because when you cook food that is blackened it's cooked in butter. But because we're going to do this umptious butter sauce, I don't want too much butter. So I'm going to lightly saute the fish with olive oil and we're going to sprinkle this good delicious herb garlic tomato butter sauce over it. Let's get this sauce started. For the sauce, we are going to add two tablespoons of butter to a nice hot pan. Then we are going to add those beautifully chopped tomatoes. We are going to saute these until they get nice and soft. Go ahead add a little bit of your garlic and your roasted garlic. We're going to mix that up and then you're going to season this. We want this to be delicious. So we're going to add some lemon juice. We're going to season with some salt. We're also going to add our fresh basil to this and you also want to add some pepper. Now you're going to season this to taste. You're going to turn the heat down and just let this sauce marinate and get scrumptious. Look at that delicious. Now that our sauce is finished, we're going to fry these fillets. So you want to add the fish to a nice smoking hot skillet with some olive oil. We're just going to shallow fry these. We're not deep frying them. Once they are cooked for about two minutes on one side, you're going to flip them. It should be a nice golden brown. You're going to cook these on all sides and then we're going to remove and drain on a paper towel. Look how golden and delicious this is but the coating is very thin. While your fish is resting, it's time to cook the eggplant. We are going to dry the eggplant off because the salt brought the water to the surface. Then we're going to put these in a pan with about one tablespoon of olive oil. We are going to sear these on one side for about two minutes. Flip them over. They should be nice golden brown. Sear for another two to three minutes before removing. You'll know they're done when they're nice and soft. Once they're out of the pan, we're just going to top it off with a little salt for flavoring and then we're done. Let's plate this delicious meal. We're going to start with your sauce. I'm just going to go around in a circle. You can plate this however you want to but I like the circle. It just makes the plate look really pretty. Then you're going to arrange your eggplant. You can do this however you want. I thought that the nice round disc would look good in a straight line. You're going to play around with this however you want to but arrange your eggplant nice and evenly. Now let's top this with our beautiful fish. You just got to figure out how you want it to go. Just let the vibe move you. You want to go for height as well. Then we're going to top this with our beautiful sauce. We're going to garnish with a little lemon, sprinkle with a little parsley and there you go. Bon Appetit. Let's eat.