I have some tilapia fish for dinner, and they still have their heads on!!

[Lulumama]

i am giving up on cooking.

help! do i just cut the heads off.. and then waht. is it like bream or sea bass?

Roast them in the oven with olive oil, garlic, some lemon and parsley, for about half an hour at a high heat. You can do them in foil for less time, too. No need to remove anything, assuming they're gutted and scaled.

If no lemon/parsley, not to worry. Roasting fish is the best way to preserve the flavour of the fish itself. You can even roast fish on a big bed of mixed veg that all roast together in the oven - v tasty and only 1 dish to wash up afterwards.

thank you , that is very , very helpful!

don't cut the head off. you can suck out the eyeballs and cheeks after cooking. yum yum.

dh loves doing that foxy, makes me gip.

went to a fab wedding party for a nigerian family, and there was lots of fish heads in various things. not quite brave enough to attempt that again !

Lulu - How was your dinner???

sorry, just checked back on this

sadyl it was a disaster

the fish were not filleted, and DH not good with fish bones. they were riddled with big sharp bones. i tried to salvage it for pie, but i jsut could nto get the bones out .

thank you for asking though, i will buy them again as i tasted some and it was delish, but will get them deheaded and filleted first !!

Sorry, hadn;t realised you had expected them to be filleted: if they still have heads and tails they still have bones. But, if you eat the flesh of the top half first, you can usually do a reasonable job of stripping off most of the skeleton before setting about the bottom half. That's half the fun of eating proper fish. But sounds as though your dh doesn't agree. Fillets don't work that well in the oven, so don't repeat the recipe with anything other than whole fish - stick to lemon juice and garlic in the pan.

Sorry again for misleading you.

s'alright ! not your fault, i should have realised, they had been gutted but that was all . thanks for the advice