Red Snapper

Well, I bought a fish for last Monday's dinner. It looked a bit like this red snapper - well, it probably isn't the same fish, but I call it that cos it looks quite similar to the red snappers I used to buy occasionally in Spore. It's one of the few fish I have tried to cook here in Japan. As it's very fresh, I usually steam it and then pour over fried garlic, fried ginger and chopped coriander if I have it. Frying fish just makes my whole house smell since it's an open concept kitchen and I hardly open the windows/sliding doors.

Anyway, I bought this fish for 780yen on Monday. Little girl and Papa enjoyed it, so I thought I might cook it again on Thursday. I found another one at the supermarket and bought it. But it turned out to cost me 1800yen! That's about RM50 btw!! And it wasn't a big fish - just nice for the 3 of us! Aiyo... by the time I discovered the price, the fella had already cleaned and gutted it, so how to reject it? Why didn't I know the price in advance? Well, these fish are not prepacked, they are laid out on ice with a label - written in Jap and with the price written in chinese numerals. I have tried to make sense of the prices before, but since I can only read up to number 3, and since it's written top to bottom I can't quite make out where the Jap words end and the numbers begin! I have asked the price before, but they answer so fast, I can hardly catch the words. So since I had bought the same fishy recently, I thought it would be okay! haha...

Anyway, it did make a nice dish. C said he could taste the difference from the previous fish - said that the flesh was less compact. I shall be more cautious in the future! That's rather too much to spend on a small fish. I had to count my money that day to make sure I had enough to buy all the other things I wanted to!