This is from a post on eGullet, from a woman who cooks for 40+ people,
it might be helpful for you friend to take a look at her posts. It's interesting to see how she handles it. I think she eventually ended up oven cooking this recipe. The recipe and verbage below is hers.
Pecan Crusted Tilapia with Brown Butter Sauce
This meal went surprisingly smoothly, given that one of my assistant cooks (who was a last minute replacement) forgot he was coming and didn't show up until 5. We recruited someone to set tables for us, so that helped a lot. But mostly, we were just fortunate that despite sounding pretty snazzy, it was actually quite an easy recipe.
As much as I love to cook, this menu was a little different for me, as I didn't follow a set recipe for anything I made. Sure, I'd done some research looking at different recipes, but once in the kitchen it was just making it up as I went along.
We had 28 meat eating adults, 7 veggie adults, 1 meat eating teen, and 13 assorted children. I spent $196, which works out to $5.89 per adult (including the 12% pantry fee). A little higher than my usual, but still in the ballpark. Not very organic, but hey, we didn't run out of food and even had a goodly amount of leftovers.
Pecan Crusted Tilapia with Brown Butter Sauce
12 lbs fresh tilapia filets
2 lbs chopped pecans
16 oz panko bread crumbs (not sure if that measure is weight or volume - two 8 oz cans)
9 eggs
flour, salt and pepper from the pantry
5 sticks butter
4 lemons
parsley
I got the fish from a great fishmonger here in town (Monahan's in Kerrytown) and it was awesomely fresh and really excellent quality. And he cut me a deal for buying in bulk, so it was quite affordable too. I see other tilapia meals in my future.
12 lbs of tilapia worked out to 33 filets. I was worried that if many of the kids ate fish, we wouldn't have quite enough, so we cut all of the tilapia in half before breading and frying them. This was a really good idea, as the more regular shapes were much easier to work with. To make the coating, I just combined the pecans and bread crumbs in the food processor until they were a nice size, then had my assistant cook do a standard flour, egg, bread crumbs thing. We prepped all the fish ahead and had them out on sheet pans waiting for their turn in the pan.
The limitations of our stovetop came into play quite a bit here, as I could only cook two pans at a time. All in all it took about 40 minutes to cook all of the fish. I kept the early batches in a warming oven, and while they weren't as crisp as the ones fresh from the stove, the flavor was good and they didn't dry out at all, so that was okay.
I made the sauce up in advance, not using the pans the fish were cooked in. For one, I didn't want to have to worry about it at the last minute. And even though we were wiping out pans in between batches as necessary, they were still pretty nasty with burnt bits by the end. Cooking the sauce separately gave me much more control over the heat, and we just reheated it at the last minute to get it to the tables as hot as possible. Technique - brown the butter, add lemon juice, stir to combine, add salt if necessary, stir in chopped parsley - voila!
http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=38117&st=180
