Ginger Fish Pouches

I know that a lot of people are scared of using ginger in their food dishes. However, ginger is very commonly used in the Asian cuisine. In this case, we used ginger to mellow out the fishy taste of seafood (in the western countries, we use lemon!). Nonetheless, the use of ginger as spices is now getting more and more popular in modern cuisines, such as "asian-style" salad dressing, BBQ sauce, as well as other meat marinades. This dish is light and packed with lots of asian flavors infusing re-hydrated shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce and sesame oil (another amazing kitchen must have!) all in one pouch!

Ingredients:

• 3 heads of dry shiitake mushrooms (re-hydrated in water for at least 5 hours)
• * 3-inch piece of ginger, thinly sliced
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• a bunch of scallions, chopped (for garnish)
• 2 T vegie oil
• 2 t sesame oil
• 6 tilapia fish fillets

* If this is your 1st time using ginger, you might want to try with less of it

Marinade (combine all in one bowl)

• 3 T soy sauce
• 1 T mirin
• 1 T chinese rice wine
• 2 t rice wine vinegar

Direction:
1. Preheat oven to 350F
2. Heat a small saucepan on low heat and add the vegie oil and sesame oil.
3. Sautee ginger and garlic until fragrant and turn golden (this will tone down the spicyness of the ginger and
    infuse it into the oil).
4. Assemble however many fish fillet you want per pouch (I had 3 fillet/ pouch, and 2 pouches). Make sure
    the aluminum foil is big enough to fold into a pouch
5. Squeeze out extra water from the mushrooms and remove the stems, thinly slice the caps
6. Evenly distribute the sliced mushrooms and sauteed ginger/ garlic oil mixture into each fish pouches
7. Divide and spoon the marinade evenly per pouch
8. Wrapped the fish into pouches and oven baked (aka steam) the fish for 25 min.
9. When ready, unwrap the foil slowly (don't burnt yourself by the steam) and garnish the fish with scallions.

Enjoy!