I’m not sure if it has ever happened to you, but sometimes I’m facing the fish counter and my mind goes blank – I can’t think of an easy and quick recipe for fish and so I end up not buying anything, or at least nothing new. One of my family’s favourite fish recipes is roasted sea-bass with cherry tomatoes. It’s super easy so you can’t get it wrong – you don’t even need to follow a recipe too closely. One of the secrets with fish, in my opinion, is cooking it just right, and with such a lean fish like sea-bass you run the risk of roasting it too much, leaving you with very dry meat. In this recipe the tomatoes will help keep it moist and tasty, making for an easy meal.

Here’s the recipe…
Roasted Sea Bass with tomatoes:

• Get a non-stick oven dish big enough to contain the sea-bass — one or two fish depending on size and number of mouths to feed (we often eat two 450gr fish among the three of us)!
• Generously coat the dish with good olive oil, place the fish in the dish and turn it in so that it gets oiled too. If you have a lemon, place a slice or two in the belly.
• Fill all the gaps in the dish with cherry tomatoes that you have pinched with a fork. Rub the fish with salt on both sides and then drop a few leaves of basil on top of the tomatoes. Put salt on the tomatoes and add, if you feel like it, another sprinkle of olive oil.

Place in a hot oven, around 200°C (or a bit less if it’s a fan assisted oven) for about 20 minutes. It will be a bit less if the fish are small, but as I said this way of cooking the sea bass will allow you some leeway because the water of the tomatoes will keep the fish more moist!
Clean the fish and then serve it with a spoonful of the tomatoes that by now will be soft and very tasty!

-Michela