When someone gives you a lovely fresh
snapper, what do you do with it?
Well, you could make two large meals for a
family of four, that’s what!
Whole Baked Snapper with Fresh Braised
Vegetables and Herbs
followed the next day by Fish Cakes in Tomato Sauce.
My snapper was a reasonably big one... measuring about 45cm from mouth to the 'v' of the tail, and weighing about 1.6kg.
Here's the first recipe:
Serves 4
1 snapper
1 onion
1 green capsicum
1 lemon
1 clove garlic
bunch fresh herbs: basil, parsley, bay and oregano
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper
Potatoes for roasting
1. Preheat your oven to 220 degrees C. Gut and scale your fish, then wash and dry it thoroughly.
2. Make a double layer of foil on the bottom of a roasting pan and make a bed of raw sliced onion, green capsicum, lemon and garlic for the fish. Stuff with fresh herbs and lay the fish on top.
3. Drizzle extra virgin olive oil over the whole dish and season it.
4. Bake it in the oven covered tightly in foil for about 45 mins. The best way to tell if it is cooked, is to poke a knife into the thickest part of the flesh and check it is white and firm all the way down to the bone.
Note: I made little roast potatoes too, as I had the oven on, and served it drizzled in the juice from the veggies and fish. Delicious!
Here's the second recipe:
Serves 4
3 slices bread
400g cooked white fish
1 onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
bunch fresh herbs: basil, parsley or coriander, finely chopped
1tbsp ground cumin
2 eggs
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper
4 small portions home-made tomato sauce (p27 of Coromandel Flavour)
Rice to accompany the fish cakes
1. Remove the fish from the bones of the cooked snapper and check for any bones. Break up into bite-sized pieces.
2. Make breadcrumbs out of three slices of bread. Sweat the finely-chopped onion in a little oil. Then place all the ingredients (apart from the extra virgin olive oil) in a bowl and stir together. Use your hands to form the mixture into approx. 8 fish cakes.
3. Find a frying pan with a lid, into which the cakes will just fit if they are quite tightly squeezed in. Fry the fish cakes on each side in the olive oil and then cook them for 10 minutes in the tomato sauce with the lid on. If the sauce looks too little, add a little bit of water around the cakes.
4. Serve with rice.
