Freshwater Table Fare

[Quillback]

52 minutes ago, top_dollar said:

On little crappies and bluegills i like to leave the tail on one of the fillets.  Its a crispy little treat.

For sure, my granddad almost always cleaned bream and crappie whole, scale them, gut them, cut the head off.  He always thought that filleting them was wasting fish.  Always had the tails on them, fried, they are good!

Speaking of blue cats, the blue cats from Grand Lake are one of the best eating fish around, in my opinion.  I'll take them over crappie and walleye which are next on my list.  I can eat whites, stripers and hybrids, but they are down on the list.

Did a fishing trip up to Ontario about 20 years ago, we were mainly targeting pike, but in the evening we'd jig up walleye and yellow perch.  We kept some small pike, they were the best eating of the three, only problem is those darn Y-bones.

[Terrierman]

2 hours ago, Quillback said:

For sure, my granddad almost always cleaned bream and crappie whole, scale them, gut them, cut the head off.  He always thought that filleting them was wasting fish.  Always had the tails on them, fried, they are good!

Speaking of blue cats, the blue cats from Grand Lake are one of the best eating fish around, in my opinion.  I'll take them over crappie and walleye which are next on my list.  I can eat whites, stripers and hybrids, but they are down on the list.

Did a fishing trip up to Ontario about 20 years ago, we were mainly targeting pike, but in the evening we'd jig up walleye and yellow perch.  We kept some small pike, they were the best eating of the three, only problem is those darn Y-bones.

I agree with you about blues and also flathead.  Get every last trace of red out while cleaning them and they are excellent. 

[Seth]

We had freshly gigged suckers fried on the bank of the Meramec the other day along with some fried taders and onions. It don't get much better than that as far as I am concerned! Suckers are definitely more work to prepare though due to the scaling and scoring required. One of the guys that was present the other day had one of those $500 credit card style scoring machines. If I still gigged a lot, I would have one of those. You could flat score some suckers in no time with that thing!

[MOPanfisher]

The sucker scorers do work well.  Always good to have a buddy that has one.  Some river bank fried suckers would be tasty right about now (or anytime for that matter).