Rule #1: Don’t forget to ask the seafood counter person to gut and scale your fish for you.
Rule #2: If you forget to ask, don’t be afraid to take the fish back to the store and ask the seafood counter person to gut and scale your fish for you.
Rule #3: Gutting a fish is really gross.
You’ve probably surmised my fish journey by this point. Yes, I assumed the seafood counter person had gutted and scaled my fish. They only scaled it. Turns out seafood counter people agree that gutting a fish is gross and they won’t do it without being asked. Can I blame them? No. But learn from my mistakes. And yes, you can bring your fish back to the store and they’ll gut it if you ask.
Before Jordan, my dear husband, started his new job last week, he had time on his hands. As I was commuting home from my own new job, I thought to put his free time to good use. Why not have him drive a fish to Whole Foods to be gutted, and have him make Alison’s whole roasted snapper recipe for me? So that’s exactly what he did.
He tells me the whole preparation and cooking process was easy. “Are all of Alison’s recipes this simple?” All he had to do was combine garlic and harissa with some olive oil, and use that mixture to coat the fish and cherry tomatoes. He stuck them all in the oven, and voila! Meal ready. We served the fish with salad and brown rice.
We both decided that snapper isn’t our favorite fish. The flavor is too… fishy. The texture, a little too game-y. We far prefer branzino or salmon. Jordan found this especially disappointing because he wants to be able to say “I love eating snapper.” “That’s a cool thing to say, isn’t it?” We’ll have to score our cool points elsewhere.
139 recipes cooked, 86 to go.
check out those jammy tomatoes
