Canned fish dinners used to gross me out until last month

I always thought canned tuna was fine but anything else like sardines or mackerel seemed too weird to build a meal around. Then my neighbor brought over a bowl of sardines mashed with avocado and lemon juice on toast and I was shocked at how good it tasted. I tried it myself with a $1.30 can of sardines from Aldi and it filled me up for dinner without any hassle. Now I'm swapping in canned mackerel for chicken in cheap rice bowls and saving like $4 a meal. Has anyone else found a canned fish recipe that actually works for a full dinner?

2 comments

2 Comments

loganhart5d ago

Alright, you had me at "saving $4 a meal" but come on, is it really that serious? You ate sardines on toast one time and now you're acting like you discovered fire. I get that convenience is nice but I've tried mashing that stuff with avocado before and it's just a lumpy paste with a fishy aftertaste. Plus nobody wants to smell like a bait shop for the rest of the night. You do you but I doubt a $1.30 can of mystery fish is gonna replace a real chicken dinner for most people. Just seems like one of those things people hype up for a week then go back to normal food.

jennifer_west5d ago

You're not totally wrong @loganhart, but you're being a little hard on the whole sardine thing. First off, it's not just about saving $4 a meal. It's about having something in your pantry that won't go bad and takes two minutes to throw together when you're too tired to cook. Yeah, mashing it with avocado can be lumpy if you don't flake the fish first. Try breaking it up with a fork before you mix anything in. And the smell thing is real if you're eating them straight from the can, but if you drain them and pat them dry, the fishy odor drops way down. Nobody's saying this replaces a chicken dinner for most people, but it's a decent backup for when you don't have the energy or money for a real meal.

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