Fresh Fried Fish

For this post, I packed up my deep fryer, and traveled to upstate New York, where I spent Memorial Day weekend. My first day there, my Dad, brother, and I had a lot of success fishing, catching a total of 30 bream and yellow perch.

That day, we cleaned them all and prepared for dinner. As an appetizer, I showed off the experience I've gained with the deep fryer by making mozzarella sticks. I also made a cool variation on the ones I've already written about. Last week in the supermarket, I saw string cheese that was mozzarella and cheddar swirled around each other. And it was on sale! Obviously, I had to try this. I used the same recipe as with normal mozzarella sticks, and these were similarly delicious. Cook them just a tiny bit longer, since the cheddar doesn't melt quite as fast. These also looked cool when you took a bite and the different colors of melted cheese oozed out. Both versions were a hit with the family.
Then we moved on to the fish. We cooked 12 of our fish (24 sides) and three of the fish had eggs, which are tasty when fried up. The basket comfortably holds six pieces at a time, so we did two batches using egg and breadcrumbs, then two batches using the cornmeal and flour recipe I'm used to.
Everyone loved both of them, and I personally couldn't say one was better than the other. We ate them in buns and added ketchup or tartar sauce. Both batches cooked in about the same amount of time, but the breadcrumbs made a slightly darker finished product. I'll definitely try the breadcrumbs again, so that says a lot, given that I've always enjoyed the cornmeal recipe.
If you were curious, in the foreground of the picture of the cornmeal fish, those smaller clumps are the eggs. Good stuff!

So, I think this supports my "just use breadcrumbs on every non-dessert food" theory. Even though I can't definitively say it was better or worse, if I hadn't looked up or known any recipes, I could have just done this, and I would have loved every bite, which is exactly what the theory proposes.

I realize I've done a lot of breadcrumb deep frying lately, so next time, I'll do something a little more involved: fishcakes (poor man's crab cakes) made from bluefish, which I also caught on a separate fishing trip.

In the meantime, keep the suggestions coming. Though heart disease may stop me from getting to all of them, I want to hear your ideas, and I'll try to do as many as I can! I'll also do some maintenance on this site at some point to see if I can add it any more features like a specific suggestion board, voting, etc...