This is also a recipe from last summer which I haven't tried again this year - Darren doesn't like the whole fish thing - likes the flavour - I just don't think he is big on the eye looking at you - even though I discretely cover it with the tinfoil! or the whole worrying about the bones thing... Anyway - my post from last year...
There is nothing quite like fresh fish. In fact I am a bit of a self-confessed ‘fish snob’ along with most of my family! I don’t know any of us who would ever buy fish because if it isn’t freshly caught then we aren’t interested! This summer we have had the most fabulous weather. Between Christmas and New Year we were lucky enough to get out on the boat and get plenty of fish and a good haul of scallops.
Usually we have our fish filleted for us (thanks Dad) and we pan fry it in just a bit of butter – can’t beat it! But this year, we came about an awesome fishing spot in the Bay of Islands and one day managed to pull in 54 Snapper in about 4 hours – which was plenty of fun! We had so much fish I decided to try a few different things with it. So I asked Dad to just gut and remove the gills from 3 of the better sized ones and scrape the scales off and I have been experimenting with different ways of cooking this.
I bought this great BBQ Cook Book for Darren for Christmas one year and we have cooked and cooked from it. I found this BBQ Whole Snapper Recipe and thought I would give it a whirl. It claimed to be very simple – which it was – but it was something pretty different for us. We have tried it twice. The first time we used it as an entree for a New Year’s Eve dinner party and then more recently we cooked one for ourselves for our own dinner.
The recipe calls for Chinese Rice Wine which I didn’t have and couldn’t find at our local Countdown supermarket – so I Googled it! Apparently this CAN NOT be replaced by Rice Wine Vinegar and the closest match was Gin so I tried this and it worked fine. The second time I cooked this I had been to the Asian Supermarket in town and had picked up a bottle of the real deal stuff for about $3 a bottle – it smelled very similar to Gin and we couldn’t tell any difference in the finished dish.
The second time we cooked this, we ended up cooking it for nearly an hour as the fish hadn’t long been out of the freezer and we think we might have needed to crank the BBQ up a bit higher also – we had it about 150 degrees C.
I served the fish with Jasmine Rice and blanched SnowPeas from my garden. YUM. The only thing I wish I had done is to save a little extra of the source I poured on the fish to pour over the rice – we tried to soak up the juices from the foil and paper the fish cooked in but it was a bit messy.
