Lemony Ling Cod at the Coast!

Lemony Ling Cod, Prepped for Oven

So we spent three days at our river property on the coast, then these past two days at work have been brutal. Ya’ take a Monday off and you might as well take a week with what I came back to! However, we had the most beautiful, pleasant, sunny weather. And we worked our hineys off weedwacking the lawn and perimeter. The guy who we share the riding mower with “accidentally” left the keys in his pocket instead of leaving them in the hidden place, and since we won’t be back until Fourth of July week we had to settle for weedwacking the lawn. Very time consuming and back-breaking, but we treated ourselves with some delicious fresh-caught Ling Cod that we bought at a road-side stand. That alone made it all worth it! I must confess I enjoy Ling Cod better than Halibut (gasp!). While Halibut is a wonderful white, flaky fish, I find that Ling Cod has just the right amount of oil in it to keep it from drying out like Halibut does, but not enough to ever have that “fishy” taste so many other fish do.

With that, I present you my very simple recipe to bake Ling Cod. This fish just doesn’t need that much to make it a gourmet meal. So sweet, so tender. Drool.

Lemony Ling Cod

Milk and water mixed for marinating
1 pound Ling Cod
Mayonnaise
Lemon pepper
Sweet onion, thinly sliced
1 lemon, thinly sliced
1 Roma tomato, thinly sliced
Black pepper to taste
1 green onion, thinly sliced

Baked Lemony Ling Cod and Red Potato

First thing we did after buying the fresh Ling Cod was rinse it off, then soak it in the fridge for about 6 hours in a mixture of half milk and water. We have a convection oven in our RV at the coast, so I had to kind of guess on the heat and timing. I just don’t use it enough to know how convection ovens really bake, as we usually grill or do stove top cooking out there. However, I preheated it to 350 degrees to start with. Next, I lightly sprayed a foil-lined pan with olive oil and placed the fish on top of that. I then spread a layer of mayo over it, then liberally sprinkled with lemon pepper. Next I layered the sweet onion, lemon slices, and tomato. I used a cooking brush to sop up some of the lemony mayo juice to spread over the tomatoes too at this point. I sprinkled black pepper over that, then arranged the green onion on top of that. I initially baked it for about 20 minutes at 350, but it wasn’t quite done so bumped it up to 375 and did 10 more minutes. When cooking fish, just keep checking the thickest part until it’s white and flaky at the thickest part. I served this with a baked red potato, and an unpictured, unnamed vegetable. (Tee hee). We ate well, though. The fish was so fantastic, that just the two of us wiped out nearly that entire pound of fish that night!

We also got our dock launched back into the water after weedwacking all around that too. (It had lost some barrels and was deposited on the bank after the winter floods last year.)  Our last trip out there we got some more barrels under it, but apparently we need another one under one side of it. Well it floats! Now if we can only get our ramp straightened out to actually get out to it, lol. Our work never seems to be done out there, but I confess we get plenty of relaxing, fishing, and crabbing in every year out there.

Dock Launched June 2012