Grilled Whole Snapper

Official Entry Name: Grilled Whole Snapper with Roasted Hot Pepper Relish, Roasted Corn, Green Salad with Roasted Veggies and Roasted Fruit Sangria (AKA More roasted that you can shake a stick at.)

Submitted by Lumpy and the main portion of my entry into ISCA 13

Time for Dinner!! Tonight we are having salad with roasted veggies, roasted corn with chive butter and grilled whole snapper with Roasted Hot Pepper Relish and lemon-dill. Mmmmm Mmmm good I tell you!

Ingredients

• 2 snappers, cleaned.
• 1 lemon, cut into slices
• 3 tbspn hot pepper relish
• salt
• pepper
• 4-6 dill sprigs

Prep

I hit up the fish market down the street for some snapper earlier in the day, and the nice guy working there was kind enough to clean it for me and snip off the fins and trim the tail. Hooray for the seafood market!!

To ready our fish, sprinkle inside the cavity with salt and pepper, then stuff your fishies full of lemon slices and dill.

Next up, we are going to make 4 or 5 score cuts on each side of the body to allow our relish to get more contact with the meat of the fish.

Slather on a quarter of the pepper relish on each side of the fish, cover with plastic wrap and stow in the fridge for a couple hours to marinate.

In the mean time, lets move on to one of our accompaniments, our roasted veggie salad.

Green Salad with Roasted Veggies

• two red peppers
• 1 onion sliced
• mixed greens (about 10 oz)

Dressing

• 2 tsp brown mustard
• salt pepper to taste
• 1 clove garlic minced
• 1 sprig dill, diced
• 2 tbsp wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp xvoo (THAT'S EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL!!!)

You'll see the peppers and onion roasting later, but here they are off the grill and the peppers peeled. Not much to this, chop up the peppers into strips, the onions into pieces, whisk the dressing ingredients together and toss everything in a bowl. Easy and really, really good.

Here's the hardest part of our dinner, the corn!

Roasted Corn with chive butter

• 2 ears corn, husks pulled back and tied or removed.
• chive butter (1-2 tsp chives, 1.5 tbspn butter, pinch salt.)

Put the butter, chives and salt in a small ramikin or something that is oven safe. Put that next to the grill when you cook so it gets warm and melts the butter. Ta-da. All done.

Cooking!

Through some dark magic, all of our food takes about the same amount of time to cook. Pretty clever eh!

Chop your onions into thick slices, and skewer them with skewers (soak them in water if you are using wood) and rinse you peppers off, dry them, and give both them and the onions a light coat of oil.

Head out to the grill with all your food, and when it's good and hot, clean your grates and place food on said grill.

Here the left side of the grill is a bit hotter than the right, so I can move stuff over if something starts burning and cook things that don't take as long (in this case only the onions) over it. Note the use of the fish basket for our snapper... since fish is so protein rich, it sticks like a mofo, so the fish basket is a great investment if you grill a lot. I rubbed down the bars of the basket with a little canola oil before locking them in there to prevent sticking as well.

The onions will be done about 2 minutes per side, so they come off first, and the right side was so hot that I moved my corn and fish over to the slightly cooler (but still really hot) side. The furnace like heat of the left side was putting an awesome char on my red peppers, and things were smelling wonderful.

While cooking the corn, use a basing brush to give them a coat of your chive butter.

As for times, turn the peppers and corn a quarter every three minutes, and turn your fish once at 6 minutes. Keep an eye on the corn, as it can go from roasted to extra charcoal rather quickly. Your goal there is a nice golden brown, not black (a little bit of black is OK.) The red peppers are a different story.. you want those buggers to be black as night.

Once you pull your food off the grill, brush your corn again with butter, and while the fish rests (covered under foil) for about 5 minutes, skin your peppers under cold water, or if they cool down enough after a few minutes that you can touch them just with your fingers. Assemble salad, put a fishie, an ear of corn and some greens on a plate, pour yourself a glass of [Roasted Sangria|roasted sangria] and enjoy.

About twenty minutes later, you should be left with something like this.

Enjoy!