Gone fishing
Monday, March 31, 2008
I like to head down to the Italian Market sometimes and visit the fish mongers. Sometimes the fish look good and fresh, and sometimes they don’t. Whatever the case, it’s rare that the fish guys have a good sense of where exactly that fish came from...and chances are that it definitely isn’t local.
It is something of a sore point with me that we live so close to the Jersey shore and the waters of the Chesapeake, yet there’s no good mechanism in or around Philadelphia to find local fish. It’s simple to find locally grown produce and meat - farmers are proud of it and they advertise. Why that isn’t the case with locally grown/locally caught fish, I’ll never know.
But let it never be said we can’t take matters into our own hands, especially if you’ve got a husband who likes to fish!
For Philadelphians, fishing for your own food is problematic. I mean, the very idea of eating fish caught in the city limits parts of the Delaware or Schuylkill Rivers is unthinkable. Corporations routinely dump arsenic, untreated sewage, and all sorts of things into our waterways, and I’m on the water enough to know there are a plethora of dead bodies in both rivers. You can eat some of the fish caught in the river, but there’s a severe limit on what you can eat and how much of it you can eat.
The suburbs offer a better solution. In some cases, not much better. But at least you don’t have to worry too much about eating super contaminated three-eyed fish!
In Southeast Pennsylvania trout season started on March 29. Out here in Delaware County, there are a few good spots to fish trout. Saturday morning, my husband took his first fishing jaunt of the season and brought home a rainbow trout and a brown trout. My hero!
We did have a discussion, though, about whether or not you can call a trout caught just a few miles from the house but raised further away local. In this case, the trout that were stocked are from somewhere in Lancaster County and that means they’re probably within our 100 mile radius. But if the fish came from further away, I’m not sure if that would count. Thoughts on this?
After all my griping about not being able to find a reliable source for local fish, I was so happy to have these trout! You just can’t get any fresher than that. I pan-fried them in some butter I made last week, and served the fillets with some lightly cooked baby spinach from, I think, Green Meadow Farm and sauteed mushrooms from Mother Earth Mushrooms. It was fantastic, and I’m looking forward to more freshly caught trout this season!
Hi Nicole! You are indeed so lucky to have a fisherman in your household! And trout are among my favorite. We need an area fish buying club next! Let’s get Bob Pierson on it!
cheers,
Allison
Next entry: Hoarding
Previous entry: Near Eastern Meatloaf (by way of Lancaster County)
I also went out on opening day this year. I usually don’t bother dealing with the crowds, but things weren’t that bad on Stony Creek when I went at 5:00 in the evening. I caught a few big rainbow trout and brought home one of them for dinner.
I love to stuff a trout with leeks, pan fry it in butter, and then squeeze a little lemon juice on it after removing the skin. Of course they’re delicious without any kind of embellishments, as well.
Here’s my opinion on catching/eating stocked trout:
It’s the closest thing we can get to fresh/local trout in a responsible way. Any of our streams still clean enough to hold wild trout (small native brook trout that hardly grow large enough to eat anymore, or stocked trout that have survived the summer and started breeding populations) have received enough environmental stress to make them hardly sustainable as a source of food. I won’t keep wild trout, although I do enjoy catch-and-release fishing for wild trout more than fishing for stocked trout.
Stocked trout, on the other hand, rarely are able to survive the heat of summer in good numbers. There is a substantial movement to try to use local nurseries as the source for stocking whenever possible. That means we have fairly local trout that have been placed in a stream where they will most likely only survive for a few months. Whether we agree with the practice of stocking or not, it seems like the best thing to do is to get out there and catch a few while they’re still healthy.
If you are exploring trout fishing possibilities, don’t rule out the fall and winter months as well. Besides the state’s stockings in the spring, many local clubs stock streams throughout the cooler months of the year. Sorry for such a long comment…