Okay, I really didn’t want to show you this picture. But I decided to anyway. Not everything is perfect.
This recipe is for a grilled fish recipe from Romagna, on the northern Adriatic shore. The area is famous for it’s fish, which is usually marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, rosemary, and bread crumbs then grilled. Marcella’s recipe called for any type of whole fish, or even fish steaks. I decided to use Yellow-eye, a type of Rockfish we catch here in Alaska.
While I don’t have a before picture of this exact fish I grilled, here is a photo of me holding one my husband caught the same weekend out on our boat in Prince William Sound. The fish looks the same, except the one I am holding here is larger. It didn’t seem so impressive to take a photo of me holding the smaller one that I caught.

Okay, back to cooking the fish. The fish needed to be gutted and scaled. Scaling is a pain, and my husband decided that in the future, when I wanted to cook a whole fish, I could purchase one that’s already been scaled. (He didn’t like having to clean those scales from the boat because they stick like glue.) You wash and dry the fish, and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. You then place it in a large dish, and add olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh rosemary. You coat the fish with this mixture, then add a coating of bread crumbs. After marinating for 1-2 hours, you place on the grill. Whether it was a mistake or not, I’m not sure, but I placed the fish on foil on my gas grill. The fish cooked nicely, but when it came time to turn the fish over to cook the other side, there was a problem. The fish stuck to the foil. I managed, but as you can see from the photo, the fish lost part of his skin and his tail (I tried putting that back in place. No such luck with the skin.).
Okay, the fish didn’t look the best, but boy, did it taste good. The lemon and rosemary flavor really came through. Next time, I’ll try the recipe using fish steaks. Should be a lot easier.