Spanish Food Saturday: Smoked Salmonetta and Mussels

This week's Spanish food extravaganza is actually from last weekend. My husband has been wanting to try some fish on his new smoker, so we went into Rota to get the freshest fruit possible-- from the fish market by the docks, where the boats come in each day! They had a good variety to choose from, but we aren't too familiar with the local varieties (and the Spanish names), so it was a little intimidating to choose from whole fish, squid, snails, etc. I recognized salmonetta (which is NOT salmon!) from a restaurant menu, so we decided to try to smoke that. I remembered to asked for it "limpia," which means cleaned. They gutted it and cleaned off the scales, but left the body intact. So we just rubbed it inside and out with olive oil, lemon juice, and Old Bay seasoning, and it was ready for smoking.

 The fish smokes for 20 minutes per pound, so soon it was flaky and pink from the charcoal and hickory smoke! His smoker has a water bowl in the bottom, so it keeps everything moist and tender so it doesn't dry out while it is cooking. We had to pick through it before we could serve it to the kids, because there were a number of slender bones. But Dan figured out a good way to get the backbone and most of the bones out cleanly while leaving big pieces for us to eat. We melted a little butter with Old Bay and a few drops of lemon juice and dipped the fish into it. It was delicious!

 While the fish was cooking, I started working on the mussels-- mejillones-- which were supposed to be our appetizer. We had bought 1 kilo of fresh mussels to steam. I guess I have never used fresh mussels before, because cleaning them was a lot of work! They had to be scrubbed and debearded (pull the hairy seaweed out of them) and all the barnacles had to be removed. The barnacles pop off with a butter knife. But it took almost half an hour to clean the kilo! It only takes a few minutes to steam them, and then they pop right open. So I removed 1 half of the shell, and spooned a mixture of olive oil, garlic, fresh parsley, and grated Parmesan cheese onto each one. Then they went into the oven to broil until the cheese melted and turned golden. They finished up around the same time as the fish, but we didn't mind. They were sooooo good--rich, tasty, and fresh! We will definitely go to the fish market again!