fancy fish bags

Hehehehe. Fish bags. It's fun to say, try it! Fish bags, fish bags, fish bags. I'm not high, I swear to you.

ANYWAY.

Whilst grocery shopping yesterday, I spied with my little green eye some parchment bags made for steaming shit in the oven. Well, not shit, but you know. I was immediately entranced with the pretty picture of perfectly cooked fish and veg on the box, and I had to have them. HAD TO. I am weak. It is known, khaleesi.

I've done "en papillote" fish preparations before and enjoyed them - all except the part where you have to fight with the parchment paper to stay crimped, while evil Alton Brown's voice keeps ringing in the back of your head, maniacally laughing and saying, "IT'S SOOOO SIMMMPLE!"  Maybe he's right - maybe it IS really simple and I just fucking fail at parchment origami, I don't know. What I DO know is that what's even easier than farting around with parchment for 20 fucking minutes while your stomach rumbles and you see stars from hunger? PRE-MADE PARCHMENT BAGS, bitches.

Mystery baaaag...are you ready for your mystery baaaag? It's not full of dog poop. OR IS IT? (it's probably not)

Told you.

You guys. I can't even. These bags? Are my new favorite thing. All I did was lay a couple pieces of cod over some asparagus, green beans and sliced red pepper, add a little poorly-cut basil on top, seal the bag with a couple folds over, and it was ready to roll. I did two bags (because the Ginger Beast needs to eat, too) on a cookie sheet, stashed them in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes, and lo, the fish, eet was done!

The asparagus is being a tease in this one.

Now...I will be completely honest with you here. First of all, I really like the taste of cod, so I don't usually fuck around with it much. You could easily gussy this up with all kinds of fancy herbs and citrus and whatever, but...I really like cod. Second of all, the next time I do this, I will NOT lay the fish directly on the veg unless I have significantly thinner pieces of fish. These were some big, manly cod pieces (see what I did there? Manly? Cod pieces? OMG, somebody stop me. No, really...), and the veg underneath didn't cook as much as it could have. We like our veg pretty al dente here at Chez OGC and that asparagus was borderline even for us. So, yes - next time, I'll spread the veg out around the fish for more even cook-en-ings...or maybe even just steam it separately...although honestly, that would take like half the fun out of the whole dinner-from-a-bag thing.

If you care, or even if you don't, this meal is Paleo and Whole-30 compliant, and as gluten-free as the day is long. Tra-la-la, healthy food.