If you buy a large fish to cut it in filets, use its leftovers to prepare a pasta dish
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 3 € pp)
- Salt
- 320 g vermicelli
- 200 to 300 g leftovers of fresh cod or any other fish
- EV olive oil
- 1 garlic clove
- 1 medium fennel root
- 250g of tomato sauce (passata)
- fennel leaves for garnishing
In modern cuisine most fishes come to table “clean” without head, skin, bones and spines. But fileting fish creates a lot of small pieces, very tasty but not suitable for serving. So, we, the cooks (hurray) have to find a solution for these leftovers.
-Pasta, pasta, pasta.
-OK, we will prepare a pasta, but let me finish. So, we, the cooks, I repeat, we remove all spines from the fish pieces and then we turn them into croquettes, parmentiers, fish ragù, rillettes and many many other things. But today people want pasta and, as Democratic who we are, we cannot do any different.
I forgot to tell you that the top (cheeks) and bottom (tail) parts of the fish have a lot of gelatine, something very positive for all the above preparations.
Last Saturday, when I expected for dinner my wife´s parents I bought a fresh cod of about 1,5 kg (In Mediterranean sea there are local species of cod, their name in Italian is merluzzi). I cut 4 beautiful filets for the main course of the dinner, I used the head and the central bone for a starting soup, but there were also many small pieces of fish I didn´t use. So I boiled them for just a minute, something that helped me remove all small spines and the next day I prepared a very very tasty pasta, like this we prepare together.
So after preparing the fish, we clean the fennel very well, we remove its hard bottom and the exterior part, and we cut it in small pieces. We preheat a pan with a little bit of olive oil and water and we gently cook it, till tender.
In a cold pan with olive oil we add the garlic clove cut in slices. We bring to heat and we gently fry it till golden. We add the tomato passata and we leave the sauce thicken but not very much as vermicelli is a thin pasta shape, which requires plenty of sauce. We salt it
Meanwhile we bring to boil a pot with salted water and we add the vermicelli.
When the pasta is ready (1 minute less than al dente of course) we add it in the pan with the sauce and the fish pieces to mantecare, adding some boiling water from the pot.
We put in plates adding some fennel leaves and we serve.
