I wasn’t almost going to post this because of one grave mistake I had made in preparing the recipe I got from a book by Yoko Arimoto I bought last week.
I had all the necessary ingredients after going into a lot of trouble buying these beautiful basil leaves in my neighborhood. All the shops were simply out of them.
The point of the cookbook I is that it is entirely on cooking fish. The point about this particular recipe is that it is a “grilled fish” dish rather than “sauteed” which is the norm with this kind of cut and prepared fish. It is interesting to note that almost every Japanese home comes equipped with a very small fish grill built underneath the stove instead of a full oven as is my current kitchen. My mother always opted to install the bigger, more western style oven at home and used it mostly to cook meat. I don’t really remember eating fish at home.
Anyway, I attempted to take pics of the grill cooking the fish but all the reflections were wrong so here we go with the result.
Grilled swordfish with basil sauce
So the gravely wrong thing about this dish is that the sauce isn’t supposed to be this mixture of dirty green, yellow, and red. Well you can’t even see the red. It was supposed to be much more bright green like that of the color of the fresh basil leaves above with bits of red from the tomato mixed in. I noticed too late that I had misread the recipe and blended everything in the food processor rather than adding chopped tomato just at the end w/o further chopping it at high speed.
Some Sicilian red to go with that.
Though it looked quite ugly it actually tasted great.
A blog by Ayako Mathies 