Kick His Ass Sea Bass

There were only two things I missed food-wise while I was in Israel.  The first was real coffee.  Israelis seem to have a partiality for instant for some bizarre reason.  It was great to get back to the states and have a real cup of Joe.  The other was seafood.  A lot of our time was spent in the dessert where there's not so much seafood - go fig.  Even when we got to the beach areas I somehow ended up eating all meat (just couldn't say no to shwarma) so I was ready for something with gills for my first home cooked meal.

I was still getting over a bad cold/cough that I caught toward the end of the trip so I didn't want to spend too much time in the kitchen.  I looked for the easiest new recipe on my Epicurious app while standing at the fish counter with the rule that if I needed to buy more than three ingredients I wouldn't make it.  I ended up making sea bass with spicy roasted bell pepper sauce.  Roast your own peppers over an open flame or buy them in a jar - I don't really care; it's going to taste good either way.  Put the roasted peppers in a food processor along with almonds, olive oil, red wine vinegar, tomato paste, and cayenne pepper.  Finito.  The amount of cayenne will determine how kick-assy the sauce is.  I wanted to cure whatever it is that's been ailin' me so I made sure to give it quite a few good shakes of cayenne.

Sea bass is one of those fishies that just tastes super fresh and clean.  That freshness, I now know, comes at a price.  That stuff is $29/lb!  Thankfully, I got a steal at the meat counter so it all evened out, but for that price I was disappointed to find bones in my filet.  Tsk tsk, Whole Foods.  It's ok, I love you anyways because this meal was so good overall.  The almonds and tomato paste give the sauce a thicker texture so it wont just slide everywhere all willy nilly.  Nobody likes a slippery sauce.  I even added it to the spinach I used as the bed for my fish because, let's face it, frozen spinach can be sort of bland.  After two weeks of meat meat meat, this dish hit the spot.  And it was healthy.  Bonus.