Mackerel fillet with cedrat, lemon juice and rocket

Lately I have been trying to change the rhythm of meals during the day towards a more southern regime – a full lunch and a light dinner. When both my wife and I had full-time office jobs, we would take a quick lunch – sometimes prepared at home and kept in a plastic container – and enjoy a good dinner at the table with the television news in the background.

In the south of France, and in Italy and Spain, there is more attention for an important lunch while the evening can be light – in Spain down to some tapas.

That is not easy to combine with office hours – but then in some countries the midday break is longer than what Dutch or English office workers would be permitted to take or be inclined to use.

But a heavy evening meal means that you are storing calories that you are not going to spend in the coming hours, and thus transform in body fat, while the hunger in the evening is provoked by insufficient intake at the middle of the day when the body still had effort to provide – hence the “snacking urge” at four or five PM..

In any case, this Sunday I found some nice mackerel fillets at a fishmonger I know – I do not always trust discounted fish fillet and took them home for dinner for when we returned from a guided touring walk around a modern new quarter near the BNF library along the Seine river.

Because it was a cold and rainy day, we lunched on a Dutch pea soup.

We arrived back late and towards nine, when we started to feel hungry, I quickly made this tasty and light meal.

The fillets are only cooked on the skin side – unilaterally – but unlike in some recipes for unilaterally cooked salmon, the topside is not left raw.

Ingredients

• Six mackerel fillets
• Cedrat jelly (a citrus fruit from Corsica)
• 200 grams of rocket salad
• Lemon juice
• Red pepper (that is a ground red kind of pepper, not red pepperS)
• Soy sauce
• Olive oil

Steps

1. Clean the fillets with paper towel
2. Heat olive oil in a skillet
3. When hot, lay the fillets skin side down in the pan and start cooking.
4. When the filets start to retract, lower the heat and put a lid on the skillet.
5. Meanwhile wash and dry to rocket salad and put on plates to which you add a dollop of cedrat jelly.
6. Take the lid from the skillet to check the fish, the top should turn while and the red line where the bones were should turn dark. But you are not there yet, add some lemon juice and sprinkle the red pepper and continue to cook until the fish is done. Present the fish on plates, you can put at least one fillet skin side up to show the pattern of the mackerel skin (that should be slightly browned from the first few minutes at high heat)