Sardines

This is a dated article, but it touches on one of my favorite fish of all times, sardines. I remember eating sardines frequently in Lebanon, freshly bought during the height of their season, which is Spring time. Now that I am living on the US east coat, I have been bying sardines from Whole Food (they sell them at ~$10/lb), and they are mostly imported from Portugal. They tend to be a bit larger in size than the small sardines I remember eating in Lebanon.
My favorite way of cooking and eating sardines is very simple (I buy them already cleaned): deep fry them and eat them whole (bones included if the sardines are really small but excluding the head and tail) with salt and freshly squeezed lemon juice.

The Atlantic ( July/August 2007):

"The best way to rediscover sardines— and overcome residual aversion based on the tins of childhood—is to eat them fresh, just as diners graduated from canned tuna to grilled tuna to tuna tartare. (“It’s phenomenal how it spread,” Nancy Oakes, the chef of the popular Boulevard, in San Francisco, told me during the tuna expedition. “People don’t eat much cooked tuna anymore.”) Almost any ambitious restaurant has grilled tuna on the menu, cooked to remain raw in the middle. My uncharitable theory is that people like grilled tuna or salmon because it’s good for them and has very little flavor—just a bland richness. Sardines do have flavor. The fresh sardines that come to restaurants are about 6 inches long, and with their slim bodies and silvery skin they arrive on a plate looking as pretty as trout. But the taste is trout with character. (The trout you get in restaurants and markets is farmed and pallid.)
I go frequently to Rendezvous, a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Steve Johnson, the chef, almost always has grilled sardines on the menu. The height of the season is summer, but he also buys sardines frozen, and always from the same Portuguese fishmonger; the fresh sardines available on the East Coast come from across the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean. Johnson, himself an “amateur fisherman,” defends oily fish like mackerel and bluefish, a great Northeast treat: “When they’re really fresh, they’re pristine, and they smell the way they’re supposed to—clean and like the sea.” Johnson serves sardines with classic accompaniments to oily fish, such as a fennel and black-olive salad with preserved-lemon vinaigrette, and he likes them with smoked paprika, too. "

Read more.