Filet-O-Fish

Senior Editor Kevin Koenig recently took a trip to the Abacos aboard the Pursuit DC 325. There he spent some time spearfishing over plane wrecks for highly invasive lionfish. The colorful fish don’t belong in the Atlantic Ocean, they’ll eat anything they can fit in their mouths, and not many things eat them, owing to the poisonous spines running along their dorsal region. Luckily for us, if you cut off the spines, lionfish are delicious, and have a taste profile somewhere between grouper and mahi, with a hint of butteriness. For a tutorial video on how to de-spine a lionfish, go to www.pmymag.com, and for a traditional Bahamian recipe for them, see below.

INGREDIENTS: Lionfish filet, oil (we recommend something with a high smoke point, like grapeseed or canola oil), cornstarch, flour, limes, orange juice, garlic, salt, pepper INSTRUCTIONS: First and foremost, remove the dorsal spines. This is important, as the spines are where the venom lies. Then, filet the fish, and gently wash it and pat it dry. Prepare a marinade of lime juice, orange juice, garlic, salt, and plenty of pepper—marinate filets for an hour. Next coat the fish in cornstarch and flour and fry in oil until golden brown. Serve with lime wedges and tartar sauce. Hot sauce is good too.

“It’s a paramount engineering attempt not just for Italy, but for the whole world.” — Emilio Campana, the director of the research office for naval and maritime engineering at Italy’s National Research Council, speaking on the effort to raise and transport the sunken wreck of the Costa Concordia, which sank off the coast of Italy in 2012, taking 32 lives. During the salvage operation, the budget for the project swelled from an estimated $300 million to more than $1 billion. At press time, the operation was still underway.