This is one of the first few simple dishes my mom taught me to cook when she was getting me acquainted with the kitchen and cooking. It’s probably the simplest recipe one can use to fry fish. It requires 3 basic ingredients - tumeric, salt and ground black pepper. Of course you’ll need the fish and oil - Duh! But that’s all there is to it. Really easy but the tricky part comes with knowing how much to add of each ingredient. There’s no real measurement. Depending on the amount of fish you have, it becomes a matter of being able to judge if there’s enough spices to coat the fish sufficiently just by looking.

You don’t want the fish caked with the spices nor so lightly coated that there’s hardly any taste at all.  If there’s too little tumeric, the fried fish will look anaemic, too much and it’ll probably look jaundiced. The consolation though is that you can’t go wrong with the other two ingredients. Finally, I think cooking is not an exact science - unlike some baking recipes - it’s trial and error and once you’ve got it, you don’t have to worry about losing it. And if you didn’t get it the first time, well at least you learnt something, right? Good luck!

Ingredients:

Fish - whole/fillet/slices
tumeric powder
salt
ground black pepper
cili powder (optional)
oil for shallow/deep frying

Method:

1. Clean fish (not necessary to pat the fish dry) and lay slices in a shallow bowl.
2. Sprinkle the tumeric, salt and pepper. There should be enough to coat all the fish slices thinly with the spices.
3. Heat oil in a pan. When oil is hot, slide the fish slices into the oil. Do not overcrowd or overlap the slices.
4. Remove from the oil, drain on kitchen paper. Serve hot with rice.