Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Eat your heart out, Jamie Oliver

Tonight's Menu

  • herb and lemon roasted coro coro fillets
  • chuffed potatoes
  • green salad "bar"
So here's what happened: while at my local sucky supermarket buying tilapia, I saw that they had this relatively inexpensive fish called coro coro. I had never heard of it before, but it was cheap-ish and I was up for an adventure, so what the heck?

I had no idea what to do with it, but it appeared relatively meaty and had the skin still on, so I decided to roast it a la Jamie Oliver. First I slashed the skin with a knife and sprinkled both sides with salt and pepper. Then I cut two lemons into quarters, squeezed a bit of juice into my giant mortar, added some EVOO and sprigs of fresh thyme, rosemary and oregano, and bashed away at them. I fished out the larger sprigs that were still intact and layered them along with the lemon quarters (including the ones I'd already squeezed) in the bottom of a shallow baking pan, then I rubbed the leftover herby oil all over the fillets and placed them skin side up on top of the lemons/herbs. Then I roasted them in the oven at 450 degrees F for about 13 minutes or so (they were fairly thick -- a good rule of thumb is 10 minutes per inch of thickness). After they came out of the oven, I grabbed a lemon wedge with tongs and squeezed it on the fish again. This came out really good! If anything, it could have used even MORE herbs. Next time I will really go nuts, and maybe throw in some capers or something.

The potatoes were the usual, small red-skinned potatoes parboiled until tender and then tossed around in a hot pan with some butter.

The salad bar tonight was stocked with mixed lettuces, sliced cucumber, sliced carrots, and grape tomatoes. Yum!

We were in kind of a hurry tonight (the boy was participating in his school spelling bee this evening -- he took 12th place! woo!) and this was actually relatively quick, believe it or not!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! We were curious where you got the coro coro? My girlfriend and I picked some up at our local HEB near Austin. We were substituting Snapper...the thing is, when I google "coro coro", pretty much NOTHING comes up, except this blog! Pretty wierd. I'm just trying to learn more about this mystery fish. Our's turned out pretty good too. We grilled it in a grill pan on the stove w/ some fresh lime juice, curry powder, garlic powder, sea salt. Then we made a butter mixture with lime zest, salt, chili powder and cilantro then spread a little over the top of the fish as it came off the grill....good stuff! Please let us know if you know more about this fish...thanks. -Zach (zachcraigslist (at) gmail (dot) com)

Badger said...

I got the coro coro at HEB also, and like you, got absolutely nothing when I tried googling for recipes! That's why I had to sort of wing it. Your version sounds excellent, too! Anything with lime zest and chili powder is okay by me!

Anonymous said...

Is it the white grunt? (hee)
http://tinyurl.com/ynmr9y

At the bottom of the page, they mention a dish called "Grits and Grunts", a Floridian dish.

Badger said...

Hey, could be! Now I know what to google for.

Anonymous said...

The corocoro fish is the one we find in US that we call grunt fish. In Mexico they call them burros. Look like the snapper but have some differences in appearance.

Globally, 150 species of grunts have been identified, many of them hard to differentiate. In Mexican waters, there are reports of as many as 25 different kinds of grunts in the Sea of Cortez alone.