Having dropped off my daughters at their drama school for the afternoon I stopped by the supermarket on my way home. Not my usual one, this one I knew had a good fish counter so I was interested to see what they would have on offer for the day.

There\’s been a lot of talk in Europe about fishing quotas recently and a practice known as discarding where perfectly good fish are thrown away (dead) because it\’s illegal to land them. The law is there to protect the over fished species such as cod and haddock but the practice of discarding is defeating the object so much so that one of our celebrity chefs is championing the cause with a campaign called fish fight.

Anyway I wanted to see what else was on offer other than cod and haddock. My eyes immediately fell on coley but that still didn\’t really get me out of my comfort zone and then I saw some really cheap fish at the back of the display called red gurnard. To be fair it didn\’t look that appetizing but I pressed ahead and asked the fishmonger about it.

He explained that he would fillet it and that I would end up with a smaller version of a monkfish tail. My eyes lit up, monkfish tails are 4 time the price so I just had to give it a go. Hopefully your fishmonger will fillet yours too but if you ever get caught short and need to know how to prepare gurnard it\’s like this:-

There\’s a spiny ridge on the back of the fish and my fishmonger slid his filleting knife under it at the tail and proceeded to work it free towards the head. When he reached the head he pulled it forward (like your chin resting on your chest) and the fish effectively split open.

At this point it did get a bit messy because the guts spilled out but the whole body of the fish came away from the skin also. He then pulled the body of the fish from the skin just enough so that he could rest his knife on the flesh and then pulled away the remainder of the skin.

It all came away in one movement and sure enough I had a tail of what looked like a very small monkfish. I was able to see the weight of the filleted fish and it was 70% of its gross weight so even after this process it was still miles better value than any other common fish fillet or indeed the monkfish.

One thing I did remember from a past recipe was that monkfish wrapped in bacon was particularly tasty so I waltzed off to find some streaky bacon and a box of cocktail sticks.

When home, it was simply a matter of seasoning the small gurnard tails before wrapping them in the streaky bacon and securing the bacon with a cocktail stick. Straight onto a nice hot grill and 15 minutes later I had the most wonderful taste sensation. If ever there was a case for supporting the fish fight then I think I\’ve just found it. If you\’ve never tried gurnard, you really must, it\’s really meaty and the bacon wrap recipe is really super easy to do too.

Author Bio: Paul writes grill and barbecue fish recipes for fun including his Monkfish barbecue fish recipe and barbecue sea bass.

Category: Cooking
Keywords: prepare gurnard,fish fight,common fish fillet,good fish,fish counter,fish fillet,filleted fish