These frozen white fish fillets of basa, cooked with strips of bacon and wilted spinach are a budget friendly and healthy home-made meal to feed the family.

Updated 2026 · Now with printable recipe, a similar version aimed at families with young children was originally featured on Babycentre

Budget basa fillets bacon spinach - 3-imp

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Those sum-umm-er ni-iiiiiiiights. Tell me more. I love them. They mean I can photograph food at 9pm in the garden and get away with it. This bacon studded fish supper features in my latest post on BabyCentre “White fish dishes for every family budget” and slipped down nicely with a glass of budget bubbles on the patio last week. Basa, catfish and river cobbler are all things I’d thus far avoided not realising they were in fact all different names for the same thing. Finally I bought my basa spurred on by its low price and found it as satisfying to cook with as cod. I’m somewhat on the fence that it’s mostly imported from Vietnam so not exactly local but for curiosity if nothing else it was worth trying.

They’re served with a squeeze of lemon, some black Falksalt (Cypriot salt flakes found in Westfield’s M&S) and a drizzle of honey. So no those black bits aren’t burnt bits, they’re my new hero ingredient.

Print Recipe

Basa Fillets With Bacon and Spinach

Ingredients

1 tbsp butter or olive oil
4 basa fillets
4 slices bacon cut into thin strips
100 g spinach fresh leaves, washed
1 lemon
salt to taste - I used black Sea salt flakes
honey optional - to drizzle

Instructions

Heat the butter in a large frying pan – you can use olive oil however butter gives a nice brown crispiness – and when melted fry the bacon strips.
When these are cooked use a slotted spoon to lift them out onto a small plate and set aside. In the bacon-y juices fry the fish fillets on both sides for several minutes until cooked through.
Serve the warm fish on a bed of washed spinach. The heat will wilt the spinach leaves.
Scatter over the cooked bacon strips, squeeze over some fresh lemon juice, a drizzle of clear honey.

Notes

The lemon pictured has been chargrilled to get the pleasing black stripes but there’s no need to do this at home unless you want to.

*Used here was a Cypriot black salt by FalkSalt available in selected branches of M&S.
This dish goes beautifully with a warm potato salad and if the mood takes you, a glass of chilled white wine. If you can dine in the garden even better!

These basa fillets with bacon and spinach are my entry this month to:

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Simple and in Season hosted by Sally My Custard Pie on behalf of Ren Behan;

and Credit Crunch Munch run by Helen and Camilla, this month hosted by ME.

Enter this month’s Credit Crunch Munch

If you’d like to enter Credit Crunch Munch pop your link in the linky below and I will round up after 29th July. This is the event for thifty dishes, imaginative thing with left overs, marked down ingredients made special etc – for a full list of criteria and rules check Helen’s post here. In brief, display the CCM badge and link to a) this post and b) Helen and Camilla’s Credit Crunch Munch pages. New meals only please and linky will close on 29th July.

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Basa Fillets with Bacon and Spinach