Cleaning Fish

 Yesterday I had some free time, so naturally...I cleaned 3 dozen fish.

What did you do?

Yeah, Andrew and I keep the bream (sunfish) that aren't too small and we occasionally keep a larger bass when we fish the lake behind the house. Sunday I kept 20 in about an hour of fishing. They were almost all bream. Plus, our habit is to keep most of the bream and often, especially on Sundays, I don't want to clean them. I put them in a plastic bag and freeze them. So, when I get around to cleaning them, I have a lot of them to clean.

I have fish cleaning down to a pretty fast process now. I have a sharp filet knife and make my first cut right behind the gills all the way to the spine. I think run the tip of my knife down the spine towards the tail. When I get below the ribs i turn the knife to slice along the tail right next to the spine. This leaves only the skin under the ribs attached. I got back and make sure all the filet is off the bones, and then slice down the ribs to the belly. I cut that, and am done.

I wind up with two filets with the skin on. I put my left finger on the tail with the skin down and slice off the skin, leaving a nice filet with only a small row of lateral bones in the middle of the chest area. I make two little cuts and pull that little sliver of flesh out with the bones.

I pass these along to Brenda who is faithful to wash the filets and divvy them up into meal-sized bags.

Now that's some GOOOOOOOD eating.  And we do enjoy them.