Something fishy...

Gosh, this past week has gone really fast! And thanks to my cooking last Sunday, we've lasted throughout it. Well, Lundulph was out a couple of evenings too.



Some time ago, Lundulph had had mackerel with paprika aioli and really liked it. So in the hopes of making the same at home, he bought some mackerel fillets. We'd frozen them for future use and defrosted them yesterday. The instructions I had was mackerel fillets with paprika aioli. Now, I didn't have enough garlic to make aioli and wasn't really sure about the paprika part, so this is what I did instead:

Ingredients

Fish

3 mackerel fillets
3 small cloves of garlic
3 tsp grapeseed oil
1 tbsp paprika


Potato salad

800 g waxy potatoes
4 large chestnut musrhooms
1 medium sized red onion
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp olive oil
black pepper


Method

1. Make the potato salad first, by dicing the potatoes and steaming them until ready.
2. In the mean time, peel the mushrooms and slice thinly. Peel and slice the onion thinly as well.
   
3. Place mushrooms and onion in a bowl, add 1 tbsp of olive oil and the soy sauce, stir well and leave to marinate.
4. When the potatoes are ready, set aside to cool a bit. Drain the mushrooms from the marinade. I rinsed them as well, to get some of the colour back, but that washed out too much of the flavour.
5. Mix the mushrooms with the potatoes in a bowl, add the rest of the olive oil and some black pepper and stir in well.
6. Preheat the grill at medium.
   
7. Lay out the fillets on aluminium foil on the grill pan. Peel the garlic and press it over the fillets and rub in well.
8. Drizzle one tbsp of grapeseed oil over each fillet and rub in.
9. Sieve the paprika over the fillets, I used a tea sieve. This helps spread the paprika more evenly and removes lumps.
10. Bake under the grill for about 3-4 minutes.

Sadly I didn't time the fish and it was a bit over-done and chewy. Also I don't think the freezing-defrosting helped either. On the whole mackerel is a lot fishier tasting than I thought, and I'm not really a fish person. But Lundulph liked it, even if it was far from what he'd eaten at the restaurant. I'll try the paprika aioli next time, I think I need to smother it with garlic to take out some of the fishiness of it.

Our greens were mangetout and broccoli. The broccoli seems to be in season now, as it looked very good, but didn't really work well with the fish and potato salad flavour-wise. The mangetout was better, but since it's well out of season, it was a bit stringy.