Over the week I?ve put in 72 hours at work (not including breaks?poor me.. and I will stop moaning now), and this has meant that I?ve had to grab food where I can which has meant mostly baguettes and paninis bought from the corner shop or the Uni bar, and so on Saturday I had a day off and decided to try something different.
I popped down to the local fishmonger on my bike? yes there still are some local amenities? and spent 5 minutes ?window shopping? and deciding what looked nice and after a while I opted for Black Sea Bream which looked beautiful in the window with its silver scales shimmering in the sunlight (wow?. lots of alliteration in that sentence!)
I could?ve got it gutted there by the fishmonger but I wanted to keep the fish whole and prepare it by myself. I?ve never gutted a fish before but I had a look in a few cookery books and it was pretty simple, and so I followed the recipe on this page and made a very nice meal.
I have to admit that I did try and fillet one of the Bream but it was a disaster and won?t try it again. The fillets ended up tiny and so I bunged them in the freezer and will probably use them in something like seafood spaghetti instead.
I think that next week I?ll see what other nice fish they?ve got and experiment a little but still use the same technique as in the recipe.
Tasty!
That Rick Stein has a lot to answer for! Never fancied the gutting thing myself, but the end result looks like you managed ok? Good cartoon fishbone effect too.
The recipe is actually by Gennaro Contaldo. I got these fish from Penns, but I?ll have to check out the new fishmonger in the town centre to see what delights they?ve got.
Doubtless it?s the sort of thing that becomes easy with repetition, but I?ve always found gutting and filleting fish to be fiendishly difficult.
Looked like a nice meal anyway.
The gutting was pretty easy, but filleting was a bitch.
It?s much easier to cook the fish whole and let the meat fall off the bones and eat it then.