Keep Cookin'

How can such an ugly fish taste so wonderful?!

Having purchased a rather large piece of monkfish for the Tom Yam soup in my previous post, we were left with  a fair portion sat awaiting some imagination and thought to compliment this wonderful ingredient. It’s funny to think that some 15-20 years ago, monkfish was only ever deemed good enough to use for scampi….oh how times of changed! Because this is now an expensive fish (the vast majority of the fish is waste and only the tail ends up being sold), it deserves some care and attention when cooking – this is not something that I cook with very often, so generally on special occasions and on this occasion, my wife passed an exam and I was extremely proud of her. She has invested a tremendous amount of time and effort in the lead up to this exam, whilst trying to juggle a full-time job and being  wonderful mother to our daughter, so hats off!

This lead me to think of what I could do with the monkfish; I remembered that way back when we first met, I attempted to win my wife over with a bit of cooking and whipped up some chicken breast, stuffed with garlic and mozzarella, wrapped in parma ham, served with roast potatoes and caramelized sugar snap peas. I remember that she was suitably impressed and decided to play on that dish slightly – if it worked before, the odds certainly appeared to be stacked in my favour .

I took some sun-dried tomato paste (or just use sun-dried tomatoes), which is pretty rich in flavour but compliments the fish extraordinarily well and, blitzed this up in a blender for a few seconds. I then laid out several pieces of parma ham (enough to wrap a portion of monkfish completely) and smeared them with the blitzed paste.

Wrap the monkfish in the paste-covered parma ham and cook in the oven at about 180 degrees for about 15 or so minutes.

Serve with vegetables – I opted for potato wedges drizzled with olive oil and parsley, baked in the oven for 30 minutes.

Because it was a bit of a celebration, we ate this with a bottle of Rose Sancerre (my wife’s favourite), which complimented the dish fantastically!

Quick, easy and great in flavour, enjoy!