Oh Moi God!

One of the last lines for me to cross in the kitchen has been cooking whole fish, if for no other reason than knowing juvenile-humored me might giggle through the delicate if unfortunately named operation de-boning, lose control of the knife, and cut myself in a fit of silly sniggering. That could only get worse when confronted with Polydactylus sexfilis on my cutting board. Luckily, I hadn't met the fish in Latin until just now, for the wonderful worker at Kanaloa was just willing to introduce me to moi as a special, snapper-like fish from Hawaii. That's moi as in oy, not moi as in bwaah (and yes, I just tried to make a Raving Rabbids joke, a wii little joke, you might say). The worker at the fish shop told us she was from Hawaii herself and was amazed they had the fish in, and was taking some home for herself.

Once we saw them, beautifully silver and spotted, and were told the store could scale and gut them, we could not take a couple home.

Sure enough, I had remembered seeing a gorgeous whole fish recipe in one of our cookbooks, and off I went in search of that. Should have figured it would be in Gordon Hammersley's Bistro Cooking at Home, one of our favorites (which includes our go-to roast chicken recipe and our go-to braised short ribs recipe). We tinkered a bit with it--subbing in fresh shiitakes for the dried--but otherwise, his snapper became our moi. Nothing like cooking with a sauce rich in Chinese five-spice to make the house itself seem edible. But then there were sugar snap peas and bok choi and ginger and garlic and scallion and red pepper and finally fish after baking that looked like this:


It tasted better, though. It was easy to pull the succulent white flesh from the bone, after eating through one side then pulling out the skeleton, almost whole, and then devour the second half. It's easy to see why it was long the favored fish of Hawaiian royalty.