Fishesto

So the fridge is looking a little bare, as it often does towards the end of the week. Luckily I had a couple of sea bass fillets in the freezer, left over from my last order with The Fish Society. Their frozen fish really isn't any different, in taste or texture, to the fresh product and has the added bonus that it stays nice and fresh in the freezer until you're ready for it.

All I had to do was move the fillets into the fridge this morning, so they could defrost over the course of the day. I put them in a colander over a bowl as they recommended, to stop fish juice dripping all over the place.

As I had some pesto left over from breakfast on Monday (A&C's pesto is fantastic) and some heirloom tomatoes in the fridge, I thought  I'd pan fry the sea bass and serve it with a tomato salad and a dollop of lovely pesto. Easy peasy.

This tastes a lot better than my awful photo makes it look!

Fish is really easy to cook but hard to be confident about; it tastes horrible if you overcook it and the texture is nasty when half-done. 
Still, as I'm finding out, the trick to a lot of meat and fish cooking is just having the pan pretty insanely hot before you put the food in. I have found that most often my fish seems to be cooked pretty spot-on after about 4 minutes frying on the skin side and 3 minutes on the flesh side, but that is just a rough estimate.

The bread and tomato salad recipe I've mentioned before: quartered or eighthed tomatoes mixed with finely diced red onion, toasted bread cubes, parsley, basil, salt, pepper, vinegar/lemon juice and olive oil, chilled in the fridge before serving. 
It's a very quick and easy, filling little salad with lots of flavour and goes with lots of different foods. It's good if you aren't in the mood for a stodgy carb side dish but still want a bit of chewy, starchy goodness.

Do give The Fish Society a go if you can, they are a very sweet company, do their best to provide ethically sourced fish and are efficient to boot. Here is what they have to say about their lovely wild sea bass: "All our sea bass is caught by a single Cornish fisherman, with rod and line. He fillets and freezes them for us within 24 hours, and then he delivers them all the way up to us in Surrey (usually taking his wife via Ikea, on the way). What a romantic tale!"

I do realise that this looks expensive, I chose sea bass and that's a pricey fish; it's just one of my favourites so I treated myself.
I also chose to buy it from this company because the quality of the fish itself is absolutely fantastic. If I want fish for the freezer, I'm better off buying it from them (where it's frozen directly after the boat gets in) rather than buying fish to be delivered fresh and then freezing it in my domestic freezer.
If I want to eat sea bass on a Friday (my A&C delivery day) then I'll order from them for a cheaper price. 

The same dinner would also have been awesome with mackerel, which is much cheaper than sea bass and just as easy to buy ethically. Abel and Cole sell a big fat dinner's worth of mackerel for just £3.99.

Hooray for fish!