Seafood Puttanesca

This recipe was published by one of my favorite food blogs and I'm so glad that I follow them because of dishes like this. They decided to take a classic puttanesca sauce and serve it over fish instead of pasta. I'm always eager to eat more fish and the puttanesca sauce is such a flavorful, and easy, sauce to prepare. The original blog post recommended swordfish, and ended up eating monkfish, but Brit and I chose tilapia as it is a lot cheaper, still very flavorful, and easy for us to get at Trader Joes.

Seafood Puttanesca
(originally published at The Bitten Word blog)

1-1.5 lbs of tilapia fillets
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 anchovies in oil, minced
3 cups diced tomatoes
3/4 cup green olives, roughly chopped
1/4 cup capers, drained
1/2 tsp red chile flakes
3 tbsp parsley, roughly chopped
4 tsp lemon juice


Over high heat, sear the fish fillets in oil for just 3 minutes, split between both sides. You want to quickly brown the outside of the fish without cooking it much inside. Remove to a plate and set aside.

Over medium heat, with a little bit of olive oil added back to the skillet, cook the garlic and anchovies for just 1-2 minutes. Mix in the tomatoes, olives, capers, and chile flakes. Cook for 10 minutes until a lot of the liquid has evaporated. Stir in the lemon juice and parsley and place the fish on top of the cooking sauce. Cover the skillet and cook over medium-low heat until the fish is cooked through. This won't take very long and I ended up just breaking the fish into bite sized pieces and let them cook more in the sauce.

We served ours over cous cous along side snow peas. YUM!