Paleo Crispy Fish Sticks With Homemade Tartar Sauce | Air Fryer Recipe

Lockdown meals are getting OLD.

I’m sure like me, you’re getting tired of cooking 3 meals a day and trying to please everyone in your household. It’s getting old people.

I eat a paleo diet, my husband eats everything but gluten and my daughter primarily wants meatless meals without dairy and gluten. And I’m tasked with coming up with colourful and good tasting combinations three times a day (cue my crossed eyes)!

I didn’t actually like cooking until a few years ago. Interestingly, my love of cooking amped itself up as my diet got cleaner and cleaner. Our palettes will adjust themselves to just about anything, however, our palettes (and genetics) were designed for good, whole, real foods.

Packaged food is created to literally light our brains up. The sneaky combinations of salt, fat and sugar (which food manufacturers have leveraged to perfection) work to addict us for obvious reasons: NOT to create or maintain health, but to keep us buying their products. And let that one sink in for a minute. These are not foods; they are food-like products.

There is a huge difference.

Our bodies know exactly what to do with real food. The digestive system knows how to absorb the nutrients from real food, and knows how to disseminate the nutrients from these foods and shuffle them to our mitochondria for uptake.

When we’re eating foods that are wrapped up in obscene amounts of sugar (always check the labels if you’re going to eat boxed food…you’d be shocked at just how much sugar is in what would be considered non-sugary foods) and oils that we cannot digest or assimilate properly. Vegetable oils are highly refined, meaning that they have to go through a process that changes their molecular structure in order to become liquid. Our cells don’t know what to do with a ‘food-like product’ where its molecular structure has been changed to the point of it being unrecognizable as food.

The wrong kind of fat, eaten on a regular basis, is one of the most damaging things we can put in our bodies.

The good news is, the right kind of fat is like music to our bodies’ ears!

Our brains are dense in fatty structure and need good fats in order to function properly. My favourite fats to work with are good quality olive oils (do not use olive oil in high heat, such as stir frying), grass fed butter or ghee, coconut oil, duck or bacon lard and avocado oil.

When I’m desperate to find something that our whole household will eat (okay, what my picky daughter will eat), I make fish sticks. These are crispy, healthy and delicious.

Made in an air fryer, so no industrial, pro-inflammatory vegetable oil, they pack a nutritious punch of protein, omega 3 fatty acids and yummy goodness.

Ingredients:

For Fish Sticks

2 – 3 large fillets of wild caught haddock

2 cups of almond flour

1 tbsp paprika

1 tbsp garlic powder

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

Avocado oil for brushing

For Homemade Tartar Sauce

1 cup of mayonnaise

2 – 3 dill pickles, diced

1 tsp of fresh lemon juice

½ tbsp of dill

½ tsp of salt

Preheat the Air Fryer to 385 degrees. Beat the eggs in a bowl and set aside. Combine the almond flour with paprika, garlic powder and salt. Cut the fillets into 2 inch strips. Dip each strip into the egg mixture and then roll in the flour mixture.

Brush the Air Fryer trays with the avocado oil and place the prepared fish sticks onto the trays, making sure the fish sticks are not touching.

Set the timer for 12 minutes. Flip the fish sticks halfway through and move the bottom pan to the top and the top pan to the bottom.

Combine all of the ingredients for the tartar sauce in a small bowl and serve with the fish sticks.