The plan for Sunday lunch was to take advantage of my “once a week meat allowance” and make slow cooked lamb tangia with preserved lemons, roughly guided by the Casa Moro recipe. However, I realised (luckily while Steve Hatt was still open on Saturday) that a couple of my guests were pescatarian.
So, as well as 6 lamb shanks, I bought about 400g of very meaty, filleted monkfish, and decided to experiment with marinating the fish in the same preserved lemon mix as I used for the lamb, and then pan fry it. It worked out very well indeed, so here it is.
Many thanks to friend and neighbour John B for the preserved lemons. Should you want to make your own, the Casa Moro second cookbook has a recipe.
Ingredients to serve 2:
400 g filleted monkfish in 2, 200g pieces
For the marinade, finely chop:
- 1 preserved lemon.
- ½ an onion.
- 1 glove garlic.
- Handful of coriander leaf.
- Teaspoon of cumin seed, crushed in a pestle and mortar
- Salt and pepper.
What to do, roughly speaking.
Blitz the lemon, onion, garlic, coriander leaf, crushed cumin seeds, salt and pepper in a blender or food processor.
Place the monkfish in a shallow bowl and marinate in this preserved lemon, onion, herb and spice mix for 2 hours. Turn it from time to time so that it soaks up the flavours on all sides.
Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan until smoking, then turn down the heat a little, lift the fish out of the marinade and place it in the pan.
Cover the pan and fry the fish for about 3 minutes, moving it around a gently to stop it from sticking. No need to turn the fish over – let it cook through from the bottom up.
After about 3 minutes, remove the lid from the pan, spoon the marinade over the fish and then replace the lid.
Continue frying for another 5 or 6 minutes. The fish should be cooked right through, and a little crispy on the bottom. If the top still looks raw, cook it for another couple of minutes.
Spoon some of the marinade over the top to serve.
I served it with roast fennel and peppers, mashed potatoes and bobby beans.
