Consider the sardine: High in healthful omega-3 fatty acids, and are abundant once again in the chilly waters of Monterey Bay, it may be the perfect food for our times. Sardines are one of the few species that environmentally conscious diners can eat without guilt or serious damage to their pockets.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program gives them the go ahead as a best choice for sustainability. The entertainment for most Americans is how delightful sardines can be when it's prepared fresh. If your only experience with this food has been mushy, oily fillets out of a can, you're in for a treat.

Fresh sardines, off the grill with an added squeeze of lemon, are milder than you may expect, with meaty flavor, crisp skin and a delicate texture. The high oil content — the source of all those omega-3s — gives this food a deep savor that holds its own with the added flavors of garlic, peppers and citrus.

Being a favorite in Mediterranean entertainment cuisines, this type of food is a growing popularity in Bay Area food circles, where sardines star on the menus of top restaurants and sell out at farmers food markets. Nate Appleman, this year's James Beard Rising Star entertainment chef, is a huge fan. He serves sardines draped atop bruschetta, roasted with green garlic and mint, or can be tossed with pasta, capers and garlic at his San Francisco restaurant, A16.

"Sardines are always available on our menu in some shape or form", says Appleman, whose restaurant takes its name from a highway in southern Italy. "I serve it raw. I roast it. I add food such as pasta. I chop it and braise it. I'd say it's my favorite food just out of the wood oven." As much as Appleman loves the flavor and versatility of sardines, the chef also appreciates that sardines are an environmentally sound product from local waters. "We're committed to being sustainable as possible. Sardines are as sustainable as gets. Sardines are on the bottom of the food chain," Appleman says.

Early July is the best time to get fresh sardines, at farmers markets or at upscale grocers such as Whole Foods. The next sardine fishing season begins July 1st and is expected to last only a few weeks, according to Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association. Many times commercial boats get a small portion of sardines out of season as a bycatch when actually fishing for mackerel, anchovies or squid, but that availability unpredictable.

When fresh food such as these sardines are available, Hans Haveman, of H&H Fresh Fish Co. based in Santa Cruz, says he sells 100 to 150 pounds a week at the 10 farmers markets he works from Monterey to Oakland. He always liked sardines, and once he started noticed them in restaurants, he decided to offer them to his own clients. "We just cleaned a ton," he says, "and they sold like crazy." (Not all sellers remove the guts for you, but H&H does.) " I like them with just olive oil on the grill," Haveman says.

" Last year, I was roasting different types of food like tomatoes alongside the sardines." The roasted tomatoes I put into a blender with a little balsamic, good olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste to make a delicious lite sauce for the fish. Fresh sardines are not available year-round due to the harvest is tightly maintained by the federal Pacific Fishery Management Council, and works to forestall a fishery food collapse such as the one that finished off Monterey's formerly cannery industry in the 1950s.

Although the sardine population can fluctuate naturally, overfishing was the main culprit in the disappearance of the fish from the bay at that time. The food season is divided into three different segments spaced from January through September, and the 60-some sardine boats working the California coast quickly reach their quota, which is a total of 66,000 metric tons this year.

Most of the harvest is frozen in bulk then sent overseas for canning, feed for aquaculture, or bait for fish higher on the food chain. The more slender sardines bring as little as 3 cents a pound on the wholesale food market. Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, hopes to raise the status of the food by making sardines a more appealing food to the average American.

The labs recently purchased an off-loading facility at the Central Coast fishing harbor to support the local food fleet. Coale is looking for a way to acquire a filleting device and package cleaned fillets to be sold to consumers in a convenient, frozen form. "The situation is Americans think of food like sardines as something that's oily, stinky and comes from a can," Coale says. "Our goal is to get Americans to think outside the can."

A solid domestic market could pay fishermen more money by the pound so they wouldn't have to catch so many fish to make a profit, he said. That would take a huge amount of pressure off a fishery that feeds other marine species and birds as well as humans.

" We should stop wasting the gift that's been put on our doorstep," Coale says, "And if this makes more sardine food eaters out of us, I think that's wonderful."