The first recipe...sweet and spicy lionfish

The weekend we officially started our lionfish cookbook challenge. Our bit towards the lionfish invasion here in The Bahamas. Can we cook our way through all the recipes in the lionfish cookbook? We shall see, but for now, we made a great start with our first choice, sweet and spicy lionfish.

Jason had invited people from The Island School and Cape Eleuthera Institute to come around and sample some lionfish, the thing was, until around 4pm that day, we didn't have any. A windy day on the Friday had stopped him going fishing, so I thought we would have to call it off. Jason, being as optimistic as ever promised lots of lionfish so a few hours before dinner time, he arrived with 11 of them! Not bad, and I should not doubt him I suppose ( I did for a bit there) ! That is 11 less lionfish invading the reef!

Tom, one of the interns at CEI had helped with the fishing and came to help prepare dinner, which was great. While the boys were busy outside (even Mango the cat seemed intrigued), I started on the interesting sounding sauce that the recipe called for.

This dish involved baking the fish whole with limes and a sauce poured on them. The sauce was a mixture of lovely flavours, oyster sauce, garlic, lime, chilies, etc. the kitchen smelled amazing, and I felt like a proper chef!

And here is one of the finished results ( we cooked 6 of them!) , it looks like the picture in the cookbook! Lionfish are a really nice white sweet fish, and the sauce complimented it perfectly. We even saved this one for Isabelle Côté and her lionfish research team when they stopped by later that evening. Everyone seemed to enjoy this one!

In case you are wondering why we are eating them, this guilt free fish, I mentioned some of this on my last post, or REEF has a handy factsheet about it here: http://www.reef.org/reef_files/Lionfish%20Quickfacts.pdf

With some lionfish left over in the freezer, and some crab too, we are going to try some crab stuffed lionfish next Saturday! Soon we may become Deep Creeks very own lionfish pop-up restaurant.

 

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