Lemon and Cilantro Crusted White Fish for #Random Recipe Challenge

This month’s Random Recipe Challenge has the same rules as always, it’s just gotten a little more high tech, with Dom over at +belleau kitchen creating a random number generator for us to use.  I have seen these, as I am sure you have, on blogs that do giveaways but I had never used one myself.

 Good fun and more probably more random than my usual method, which is to make someone give me a number.  :) Since Eat Your Books has my cookbooks all organized, it was easy enough to find book number 33 in the category of “Wherever Home is Now.”

So, this recipe was adapted from one by Bill Granger in Bills Food,  of which the cover, the endpaper and flyleaf have no apostrophe in Bills so I will cringingly omit it here.  Upon further research, I discovered that his restaurants and blog are also missing the apostrophe.  Why, Bill, why?  Is there a punctuation shortage in Australia?  Such a rich and wonderful country!  I’d be happy to send you some.  But I have to forgive Bill because this fish was delicious.  And he is such a cutie pie.

Ingredients
1/2 cup or about 40g fresh breadcrumbs
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup or about 15g fresh cilantro or coriander leaves (or flat-leafed parsley if you are not a fan of cilantro)
1 small red chili (optional)
Zest of one lemon
1/2 teaspoon sea salt flakes
Few grinds of black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 thick white fish fillets (about 6 oz or 175g each)

Method
Preheat the oven to 400°F or 200°C.

Chop the garlic and cilantro roughly.  Mince the red chili, if using.

Put the breadcrumbs, garlic, chili and sea salt in the food processor.

Pour in the olive oil and grind in some black pepper and grate in the zest of the lemon. Process until you have lovely green breadcrumbs.

I almost forgot the lemon zest. You should put all the stuff in together, as per the
instructions.   But if you forget something, by all means, add it in.

Heap the mixture on top of your fish, trying to make sure it is all well covered.

Bake until cooked through.  I cooked mine for about 10 minutes and then put the oven on broil (or grill) for a few minutes more to brown the top.  If your fish is thicker or thinner you may have to adjust the time.

Bill says to serve this with garlic mashed potatoes and baby spinach, which I agree would be very lovely but I had some butternut squash that needed roasting so I did that and a small tomato salad instead.

All in all, a fabulous random recipe.  I would definitely make this again.

Enjoy!