Mackerel's a great fish for a weekday supper when you don't have a lot of time ahead of you and you want something really full of vitamins and nice and fat and juicy and tasty.
Ingredients
- four medium sized mackerel
- olive oil
- 1 clove of garlic and black pepper
- 2 good handfuls each basil, flat leaf parsley
- a good handful of nuts (your choice; pistachio, pine nuts, hazel nuts or almonds)
- juice and zest of one lime
Method
- The mackerel are just gutted to leave them whole, so put some oil on the fish rather than putting it in a pan.
- There's rather a lot of olive oil in this recipe and what I'm going to cook with it is a lovely gutsy, feisty, salsa, pesto-type sauce that will really whip up the fish.
- You are going to cook the fish on the hob, so we put a little bit of salt on them and in they go.
- While they are cooking, make the sauce.
- It's sort of a mixture between a sauce verte, which is a South American recipe, and a pesto, which is a recipe from Italy and the south of France.
- So, lots of herbs, basil and pistachios.
- Now you can use any sort of nuts - pine nuts, hazel nuts or almonds - but I like the lovely colour that pistachios give.
- Some olive oil, of course, one clove of garlic this time, and some flat leaf parsley.
- Again, mix and match the herbs: flat leaf parsley is pretty much a staple for this one, because it does have that lovely fresh taste, but you could also put coriander in here along with the basil.
- And some lime zest and juice to give it a bit of taste, little bit of pepper and get blitzing - not too much of a purée; it wants to be quite loose and crunchy.
- Fish is done, sauce is ready, serve that with a lovely salad and it's as simple as that.
