Fishy dishes

I'm on leave for the rest of the week, and Monday night was therefore not just (as often) a good cooking night, but also (much more rarely) a splash out night. I cook a lot of seafood, but not a lot of actual fish, barring the odd bit of salmon. It doesn't often seem worth it. But, I had a peach, I had Diana Henry's interesting but less-useful cookbook How to Eat a Peach, which is allllll fancypants menus, and the eponymous menu precedes the peach with sea bass, fennel and pernod aioli. I had never cooked it before, but it's a bung-in-the-oven sort of dish, the weather is not very July, and I thought I'd try it.

Mostly, this is about roasting fennel - we've been here before, though this time there's a lot of garlic, fennel seed and some orange zest involved. Cut into fairly narrow wedges, roll it about in the flavours. Give it 30 mins minimum, I reckon, about 200C, covered in foil.

Or in my case, at least 40, because I needed much less cooking time to finish than the recipe, which involved whole sea bass and about 25 minutes in the oven. I was using thin fillets, so only gave them 10 mins, and that worked nicely. Take some fresh dill and lay it in/under the fish, and squeeze on a little orange juice over the fennel for the last 5 mins of cooking.

Meanwhile, make your aioli. Do not make my mistake and put all your fennel into the oven and then have to rescue a bit - you need a couple of leaves finely chopped to go in the aioli too. Then add crushed garlic to mayonnaise, plus the fennel, and a discreet dash of Pernod. Or, in my case, forgetting I'd got a nearly-new bottle and it would be very full compared with the predecessor whose dregs hung around forever, slop in about 7 tbsps. Oops. The resulting aioli was punchy and disturbingly liquid.

It's really not a looker of a dish, even when you add the last of the fresh dill, and even if the aioli wasn't an actual puddle. But it's very tasty, and appropriately holidayish. I would not recommend this faff for a standard Monday, but given that I didn't crack open the Monday wine it did feel like a celebration.