Our grocery finally had some fresh sardines, and I decided to grill some.
First, I put some sweet potatoes, cherry tomatoes and spring greens in a baking dish and added some fresh rosemary and oregano.
Then I poured a bottle of beer into the dish and left it in the oven until the sweet potatoes became soft.
I took the dish out and placed the scaled, gutted sardines on the vegetables and spread some of the spicy green sauce from the Indian restaurant on them. 20 minutes later, the dish was done:
It looks tastier without the sardines!
Have you noticed that — unlike in Europe — when American restaurants serve fish, the head and tail (which nobody eats, anyway) have always been cut off before the dish reaches your table?
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Okay, now you know what a catfish head lookd like!
Those “barbels” that look like whiskers are sensory organs that look scary but are harmless (soft and not sharp). BUT smaller catfish have sharp spines on their dorsal and pectoral fins that can penetrate the skin and inject painful venom, so be careful how you hold a life catfish.
Still, they are DELICIOUS, and — unlike most fish — have NO scales that need to be removed before eating!
If you’ve never eaten a deep-fried catfish, you haven’t lived! Find a good Southern-style restaurant (like the ubiquitous “Cracker Barrel” chain — they’ve everywhere in the U.S. now — and discover what you’ve been missing!)
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We have a Cracker Barrel very close to us but we’ve never been. I have no idea why we never visited it. But I buy catfish filets all the time. They are very cheap around here. I had no idea the fish looked so nasty. I thought it was a picture of a bass, actually.
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True story:
Almost forty years ago when I was stationed in South Korea, I went off-post to a Korean restaurant and ordered ( in my very limited Korean dialogue) some fish soup.
The soup had a very good flavor and some tasty but unusally crunchy “rounded clumps of fish” in it. As the bowl emptied of its liquid, I finally got a good look at the last of the “rounded fish” components that I’d been devouring — and they were all FISH HEADS (the complete skull, brains, eyeballs, teeth, and all).
I actually enjoyed the dish, but never considered reordering it!
(Don’t worry, you won’t find that particular soup at Cracker Barrel.)
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I like fish heads, actually. They have the most delicious parts of the fish in them.
I’m Soviet, I can eat the weirdest stuff but get defeated by things like onion rings and boxed cereal.
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“I buy catfish filets all the time”
I never much liked catfish and cannot eat it anymore after a very traumatic experience trying to kill one. I’ll spare you the gruesome details but those things are all but immortal…
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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