Tartar Sauce

I have never bought tartar sauce.  I've never eaten it on fish when I've had fish at home.  Take me out to a restaurant, though, and I go all bug-eyed with the tartar sauce on my fish.  Until--I ate out recently with Fernando at a new-to-me restaurant, and the tartar sauce was, well, meh.  Not real tartar sauce by any stretch of the imagination.  That's when my brain kicked into recipe mode and I decided I would make it better, and healthier, at home.

I used this recipe as a guide, fiddling with the onion and eventually cutting the entire thing in half, because this is best used fairly quickly, and I'd rather not let it sit in the fridge for several weeks waiting on the next fish-for-dinner night.  (It's expensive to feed five men fish, since I don't have multiplying powers or anything.)

I also used my home-fermented pickles in this recipe, and it about killed me to use a whole cup of them.  I felt so much better using half a cup of my pickles, though, which is the other part of the reason I halved the recipe.  I guess I'll be fermenting more pickles more often!

Here is the recipe.

Tartar Sauce
Makes about a cup.

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup finely chopped dill pickles
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion (or about 1/8 teaspoon onion powder)
1 1/2 teaspoons dill (I used dried, but fresh would be amazing!)
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon cane juice crystals (or sugar)
freshly ground black pepper to taste (4-5 cranks of your pepper mill)

Mix everything up in a small bowl.  Bam!

Store leftovers in a glass jar in the fridge.  Use within a couple of weeks, but should last several if needed; stir before using.

NOTE:  I like to blend it for a few seconds with my stick/immersion blender.  It helps blend in the pickles a little more and distribute the flavor.  It's still a little chunky, and oh so good on whatever you put tartar sauce on.  Betcha it'd be good on potatoes--french fries, baked wedges...!!

Back to life,
Christine

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