Friday, February 17, 2012

The Food With a Thousand Faces

Some people who decide to go vegetarian vow they will eat nothing with a face.

We've decided to add more fish to our diet. That means we're buying a lot more food with its face still attached.

Conveniently, the discount grocery store we frequent has just massively expanded its fish section. This grocery store apparently caters to a large immigrant population, both Hispanic and Asian. (We practice our Spanish by eavesdropping in the produce section.) So a lot of the selections are . . . not what you'd find at Safeway. You can get salmon heads for only 99 cents a pound. I haven't tried that yet.

However, if it costs less than $3 a pound, was caught in the wild, and has enough meat on it that I can throw away the eyeballs, I'm willing to give it a try. I am learning to gut fish--it's not so hard, you just start pulling things out until they stop coming--but I still don't know how to debone. So far we've had mackerel and something called butter fish, plus salmon (minus the heads), of course. Really, everything tastes pretty much the same once you put enough tartar sauce on it.

DOB has mixed feelings about this--on the one hand, eating more fish was his idea. On the other hand, he prefers food in the range from thick stew to thin casserole. Things that can be eaten one-handed, with a spoon, while reading. Having to participate in the dismemberment of his meal does not enhance his dining experience.

2 comments:

Diary of an Autodidact said...

Do they have milkfish? (A Filipino specialty.) Quite good...

Wendy said...

Pretty funny! The Zoomlians want me to buy the fish with faces, but I haven't quite had the nerve. We are in Biology, however, so...

Part of the issue is that some of the Zoomlians would be much more likely to eat a fish they've dissected, and some much less so.