Garlic Butter Sea Bass with Greens & Brown Rice

Ingredients

• 250g brown rice, rinsed
• 3 spring onions, finely sliced
• 4 skin-on sea bass fillets
• 35g butter
• 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 1 lemon, cut into wedges
• 250g tenderstem broccoli, trimmed
• 100g spinach
• 120g frozen peas
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• salt and black pepper to taste
• Dressed green salad, to serve
• Fresh dill, to serve

Method

1. Get the brown rice on first — it's the slowest thing in the kitchen. Bring a pan of water to the boil, salt it generously so it tastes like the sea, and simmer the rinsed rice for around 25 minutes until tender with a little bite. Drain and keep covered so it steams gently while you finish the fish and greens.
2. Heat the olive oil in a wide frying pan over medium-high heat and add the tenderstem broccoli. Cook for 4 to 5 minutes, tossing occasionally, until it's bright green, just tender, and catching colour at the edges — that bit of char is flavour, not damage.
3. Add the peas and spinach and cook for another minute or two until the spinach has wilted down and the peas are hot through. Season well with salt and black pepper, taste a piece of broccoli, and adjust now — greens take more salt than you think. Keep warm.
4. Pat the sea bass fillets very dry with kitchen paper — water means steam, and steam means no crisp skin. Season the skin and flesh generously with salt and pepper just before they hit the pan, or the salt will draw moisture back out.
5. Heat a second frying pan — stainless or cast iron, not non-stick — over medium-high heat with a thin film of oil. Lay the fillets skin-side down, pressing gently with a fish slice for the first 10 seconds so they don't curl as the skin tightens. Cook undisturbed for 3 to 4 minutes: don't crowd the pan, do them in two batches if your pan is small. The skin should be deeply crisp and mahogany, and the flesh turned opaque almost all the way up the side.
6. Turn the fillets, drop in the butter and sliced garlic, and tilt the pan to baste the fish with the foaming butter for the final minute. Watch the garlic — you want it pale gold and fragrant, no more than 30 seconds of real colour. Burnt garlic turns the whole butter bitter and there's no rescuing it.
7. Fluff most of the sliced spring onions through the warm brown rice so the grains have a bit of life under the fish. Taste — the rice wants another pinch of salt at this stage, almost always.
8. Spoon the rice into bowls, pile the greens alongside, and sit a sea bass fillet on top, skin-side up. Spoon the garlic butter and softened garlic slices from the pan over each fillet, scatter the remaining spring onion over the rice, and finish with a firm squeeze of lemon over the fish — the acid cuts the butter and lifts the whole bowl. Serve the rest of the lemon wedges on the side.