Trout for Breakfast...Lunch and Dinner.

My Dad loves to fish. We have many colorful fish stories from his childhood that include playing hookie and swearing at elder strangers he met along the shores and waterways of rural Ohio. Moving to California following his Navy years, presented the exiting opportunity to learn new fish. We spent a lot of time camping and fishing in Mexico, but the real challenge was Sierra trout.

They're wily and elusive. They thrive in icy, fast water and can see and hear you coming. I was eight years old when I first started to participate in the process of catching enough trout to make a meal for our family of seven. Through excruciating patience I don't believe I possess, Dad eventually mastered the art and understood the finicky nature of trout. By then, my siblings caught up in age and were pressed into service. We all fished and hiked and fished some more. We caught a lot of rainbow, brook, and golden trout. My younger sister Zora and I, tired of the tedium of fishing, were re-assigned...to cleaning fish. Blah!

A family with three teen and pre-teen boys will eat a lot of fish in a sitting...in the morning, we'd catch the breakfast fish. My sister and I would dangle over the icy stream, our hands in water that would burn first and then turn our hands numb. After breakfast, we'd catch the lunch fish...after lunch, we'd catch the dinner fish. We'd catch and eat our limit, every day of our Sierra vacation...and Zora and I would clean them all.

Cleaning a few hundred fish for a week out of the year was a kooky vacation activity that none of my friends could understand or match! I didn't dare share my vacation stories! But when I hear people say that they don't care for fish, I know that they've never tasted a fresh trout...

How to clean a trout (this is kind of gory)---
Cradle the topside of the fish in your hand, and slit along from the little hole by the tail, to the jaw. Put your fingers inside the mouth and pull on the lower jaw...you'll pull the jaw and all of the insides right out towards the tail. Rinse the fish (in the freezing stream...) and press your thumbnail along the bloodline that rests the length of the fish, along the spine. Rinse again. Cook and eat right away for the most delicious, delicate fish meal you've ever had.

My Mother's Trout Breakfast
Our lunches and dinners were delicious and varied. My Mother makes magical fresh salads. Her trout breakfasts though, will always remind me of violent stormy wind in the pines, the smell of thin air and campfire, and the sound of water whipping and rushing over rock.

She'd start potatoes frying in butter. As the potatoes were snapping and browning, she'd dust the trout (skin on), in flour, salt, and pepper, and quickly pan fry in oil. We'd eat everything while it was very hot...