Fish on Fridays is a tradition we try to maintain at our house, if only to ensure we have seafood at least once a week. A perennial and simple favourite is to simply fry up a whole tilapia fish. We splurged this past week and bought some fresh tilapia fillets (at our local fish counter, a tilapia fillet is $5.99/lb. compared to just $1.99/lb. for the whole fish – yes, we could probably fillet it ourselves, but it seems like a lot of work). It was very busy at the fish counter, presumably everyone was getting fish for their Good Friday meal.

With the abnormally warm weather we’ve been having, it was also time to put the fry pan away and break out the grill. A quick search on the internet yielded the following marinade for the fish:

1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt

Source: AllRecipes.com

According to the recipe, you whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, garlic, basil, pepper, and salt in a bowl and pour it all into a resealable plastic bag.  We added the tilapia fillets and made sure they were coated with the marinade. We sealed the bag and put it in the refrigerator for a little over an hour.

We had to come up with our own recipe for the mango salsa based on what we had on hand. We combined the following ingredients in a bowl:

1 1/2 diced fresh mango
1 small tomato diced
1 tablespoon finely chopped red onion
1 tablespoon roughly chopped fresh cilantro
Juice of one half a lime
Salt and pepper to taste

When it’s all mixed together, the salsa looks great:

After an hour in the refrigerator, we took the fillets out of the marinade bag. I’ve always had trouble grilling fish fillets directly on the grill, so we use a grill pan with some foil on it. We get the grill extremely hot before putting the fish on the grill pan. The high heat sears the outside of the fish, and the oil in the marinade makes it easy to get under the fish and flip it to evenly cook each side. It’s also critical that you don’t overcook fish. Once you can easily flake it with a fork, you’re good to go. The fish was delicious. Besides the mango salsa, we served it with coconut rice (we’ll save that recipe for another day). This was an easy dish to prepare. If you’re looking for a nice alternative to grilled meat, this is a great one.