Easy Red Mullet Nicoise

This carefree recipe has all the typical flavours of niçoise cooking: olive oil, white wine, garlic, tomatoes, small black olives, lemon and basil. These are tasty and heart healthy ingredients.
These flavours combine very well with rouget, red mullet, which is a popular fish in Nice. In the old times, the people in Nice simply fried whole fresh red mullet in olive oil. The fish was not even cleaned. Nowadays it seems that people prefer fish fillets. Luckily red mullet fillets are regularly available in local supermarkets.



Easy red mullet niçoise

2 servings

About 300 g red mullet fillets
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp dried Provencal herbs
Freshly ground black pepper
2 large ripe tomatoes cut into wedges
50 ml white wine
1 lemon, cut into wedges
2 tsp capers
2 tbsp black olives of Nice.  NB! In restaurants in Nice they do not remove the stones!
About 2 tbsp olive oil
Fresh basil

In a frying pan warm 1 tbsp olive oil over low- medium heat and gently sauté the onion and garlic for about 10 minutes until soft but not brown. Then pour in the white wine, add pepper and Provencal hers, and reduce the heat to very low, almost off.

Preheat the oven to 180 ⁰ C.

Place the red mullet fillets in an oiled ovenproof dish. Press over a little lemon juice from a lemon wedge, save the rest for serving. Scatter the olives and capers over the fish fillets. Then pour over the white wine- onion sauce. Scatter the tomato wedges over the fish fillets, add some more black pepper and drizzle 1 tbsp olive oil over the tomato wedges.

Bake for 15 minutes.
Decorate with basil. Serve with lemon wedges and micro waved new potatoes.