Baked Fish Italian Style

I used sardines in this recipe but I really think mackerel would have been loads better, just because sardines have lots of tiny bones which are hard to make out under the topping. 

I suspect white fish would also work well with this. I got the inspiration from a recipe in "Two Greedy Italians".

First of all gut, fillet and pin bone your fish and lay the fillets side-by-side in a well oiled baking tray. Cover with lots of breadcrumbs, chopped garlic, parsley, basil and a thinly sliced mild chilli or bell pepper. 

  
Drizzle over some olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees C, for about 25 minutes.

This was lovely with a watercress, tomato and cucumber salad.

Shime Saba & Tamago Yaki (Japanese Pickled Mackerel & Egg Roll)

Shime Saba is a great use for fresh, local mackerel. Mackerel has a rating of 2 from the Marine Conservation Society, however I suspect line-caught cornish mackerel is higher than this. If "pickled mackerel" sounds a bit too much like herring rollmops for your liking, I'd still urge you to give these a try. The Japanese pickling liquid is much milder and sweeter than the British version. 

Make sure your fish is really very fresh though, as you are just using the acidity of the marinade to "cook" the fish, rather than applying any heat to it.

I bought my mackerel whole, so had to gut, fillet and pinbone them myself. If you want you can get them pre-prepared into fillets, but try to get the fishmonger to do this to a whole fish in front of you, rather than buying ones that may have been sitting around with the flesh exposed to the air for hours, or sat in plastic. Two mackerel and one egg roll happily fed both of us; the original recipes can be found in "Japanese Home Cooking" by Harumi Kurihara.


First of all, heavily salt the fish on both sides and lay in a seive for 2 hours. This firms them up and removes excess liquid, which is essential to the texture and taste of the finished product.
Then place them in a non-metallic dish and pour over a mix of 100ml rice vinegar, a tablespoon of caster sugar and a teaspoon of shoyu (Japanese soy sauce - this is sweeter and milder than other versions, like Chinese). Leave them to marinade for half an hour, turning them every now and again.

While the fish is pickling, make your egg roll. In a jug, mix 4 tablespoons of dashi or fish stock, 50ml mirin, 4 eggs and a tablespoon of caster sugar and beat with a fork.
Lightly oil a frying pan; I would love to get a proper rectangular tamago pan but, as I don't have one, a regular pan stands in ok.

Pour a very thin layer of the egg mixture into the pan and cook until you've got a thin pancake. Lift up one edge and roll it up. Pour in another thin layer of egg, wait until it's cooked and then roll it up with the first pancake roll inside it. Keep going until all of the mixture has been used up. Put the roll into a peice of greaseproof paper and leave to cool.


Before serving up, remove the membrane from the back of the mackerel and slice it up into bite sized sashimi slices. Slice the egg roll into generous slices and chop some spring onions to go with them. A bowl of miso soup each and a dish of shoyu, for dipping, rounds the meal off nicely.

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!