What's in the box? WHAT'S IN THE BOX!!!
That's my ominous looking fish cooler. Here's what's inside!
11 trout and 2 hybrids! o.O I froze them in serving-size packages. My husband, who is fairly disapproving of this "eat fish you caught yourself" idea, insists I freeze them for a while to kill any parasites. Freezer-ready:
One of them was truly a large fish. Imagine it with its head still on!
Now, on to the sad truth: I only caught two of them. The second-biggest bass, and a smallish bass. My kid-friend Taylor landed two, I think, and our master baiter Mark caught all the rest. Taylor's mom, Kelly (Poppy's new human) tried her hardest and didn't catch a damn thing. Kelly and Taylor headed home while Mark helped me dispatch the fish... then Mark gave me the whole box of cleaned scaled gutted fish. I suppose when you can just walk out and catch 10 fish in an afternoon you can be so generous!
Our secret bass weapon: Minnows. We had crickets, too, but the bream just weren't biting. I spent about an hour, off and on, fishing the shallows with crickets for bream, but nada. Mark stuck to minnows and the dead-tree-fish-paradise in the middle of the lake and cleaned up.
Yesterday I took some tree and horse pictures. Look, I found COLOR! This is a little sweet gum in front of a little sycamore, and it's about as colorful as we get around here.
And here's mah dawg, cause I never get tired of taking pictures of her.
Dixie
Mr. Hateful
Fat Old Thing
None of them get any grain to speak of. Whoever gets ridden - usually Champ, sometimes Dixie - gets about a scoop of oats or alfalfa after the ride, but other than that, they just eat hay. I think I mentioned Silky was kinda congested earlier this week? She seems fine now, YAY.
I had a lesson, too, but I am going to cook dinner and I'll post about that later on.
So you change your own oil and catch your own food. Color me even more impressed!
ReplyDeleteme too! valuable life skills and all . . .
ReplyDeletedo you pan-fry your bass or do you have a "special" recipe? I have baked them in the oven with butter and onions and it turned out pretty good. I've tried smoking them too, but there's just too many bones to pick around. :)
dp - Seriously, it's nothing I haven't learned by asking people and looking stuff up on the internet. I'm kinda weird - ok, I'm very weird in many ways, but I'm kinda weird in that I love learning how to do stuff. I love figuring out how things work, from cars to animals, and then actually doing the maintenance. Thus, I learned to trim my own horses, how to change my oil, how to kill a fish as quickly as possible and then turn it into food, etc.
ReplyDeleteSerena - I haven't eaten the bass yet! Seriously, I haven't gone fishing since I was a kid, but there's all these ponds on the property with tons of fish and people to fish with! So I just started again.
Yall have no doubt noticed that I am somewhat reckless, but my token nod to fish consumption safety is that I freeze my fish. Two weeks frozen solid will kill any freshwater parasites that would otherwise survive the cooking. I figure out how many fish one person could eat, based on just how small they are, then bag them and freeze them in water.
So last night my first bream came out of the freezer and I fried them like catfish. Creative, I know, but it was easy and didn't take special ingredients. Do yall have fried catfish up there? Breaded in seasoned cornmeal and fried crispy, yum. Probably the right thing to do with such tiny fish, but I'm already looking for cool recipes for my bigger bass.