chickenfeet

lemur_catta saw a recipe the other day for skate with preserved lemon and olives which sounded good but she didn't have any details. I managed to find a recipe on line that sounded like it would work so i decided to give it a go. I cook skate quite often but I have always poached it on the "bone" (I know it's cartilage not bone but whatever). This recipe called for the skate to be filleted and skinned. This is actually quite tricky; certainly trickier than filleting your average fish owing to how the thick bit of cartilage that lies on the edge of the wing is configured. Still, it was doable and I turned 750g of skate into 500g of reasonably presentable filet with only a bit of swearing.

The rest was easy. I cut the fillet into serving pieces and dipped them in seasoned flour. I also prepared 20 green olives. I used the kind called "cracked green olives" and blanched and pitted them. I chopped half a preserved lime (because I have preserved limes in the fridge not lemons) and also chopped a small handful of flat leaf parsley. I melted 80g of butter in a small pan and kept that handy on the heat. I heated a skillet very hot and added a decent amount of olive oil. When that was smoking I added the skate, cooked it one minute on each side and transferred it to heated plates. Meanwhile I heated the butter to beurre noire stage and tossed in the olives and lime followed by the parsley. I spooned the sauce mixture over the skate and that was it. It was excellent. We had it with some crusty bread to sop up the sauce and followed with a red pepper and fennel salad. We drank an Argentinian Torrontes from Alamos with it. It was a very good match indeed. The flavours in the food brought out some Muscat notes in the wine I hadn't noticed on first tasting it.

I really like skate. It's one of the few fish that is reasonably priced here, it's delicious and it's one of the more sustainable fish catches.