Fish Stew in Coconut Milk

It is becoming clear to me that I did a fair amount of cooking in March that I was expecting to blog about, but hadn’t yet started blogging again.1 Last year I made the Moqueca Vegetariana recipe from Authentic Brazilian Home Cooking and it was quite good, but it was a vegetarian version of the “real” dish Moqueca Baiana (fish stew). It was really good and at the time I decided to make the fish version of the Moqueca at some point in the future. For Science. When I pulled out the cookbook again in March I flipped though until I found the recipe for Peixada à Baiana and decided this must be it. As it turns out a Moqueca is not quite the same as a Peixada. Moqueca is a purley Brazilian dish with the word coming from the Tupi2 word moka’ika, which literally means “something wrapped in leaves to be roasted .” The something was usually fish. Peixada is a Portuguese word that roughly translates to “a fish-based dish.” They both have a coconut milk base with sliced onions, red peppers and…