Opening Day of Trout Season - The Return - The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

This is the face of a triumphant fisherman.

The face of a man who has had good Opening Days and bad Opening Days, and who now has had an Amazing Opening Day and who has photos to prove it.

He looks ready to tell you ALL about it, doesn't he? Every tiny detail.

And that's fair enough, because it really was an amazing catch.

They brought home 7 fish: 5 trout (4 rainbow and a brookie) and 2 landlocked salmon. One salmon was 27 inches long and weighed 5.53 lbs. The other was 21 inches long and weighed probably 3+ lbs, but we didn't weigh that one separately.

You can see a ton of pictures here - there are just too many to post here and it would have taken forever for me to decide which few to use.

The guys brought the fish to our house, and after letting the kids hold them and taking the requisite Triumphant Fishermen Shots of them holding all the fish on stringers, like so:

(That's Bill up above.) (And this is Joe, below.)

and hosing them (the fish, not the kids) down in the back yard and taking impressive pictures like this:

and showing the catch to our friends across the street...

it was finally time to bring the catch inside, weigh them, clean them, and cook them.

This is the 27 inch trout on the scale. Joe caught him.

And you can see Alex's arm - he was holding his camera, taking pictures of the event, too.

Like I mentioned earlier, this fish weighed 5.53 lbs.

All together, they brought home somewhere between 14-15 lbs of fish.

We didn't get an exact weight, as we didn't weigh each fish individually.

We just kept adding the fish to the bowl, and after we put the last one in, the scale shut off - it doesn't go past 14 lbs.

Bill said they actually caught more, but they let the others go.

You can take home 10 fish per person, but unless you've got a lot of mouths to feed, it's kind of wasteful to do that.

We ate fish for 3 days. Which is fine, because we all like fish, and we cooked it in different ways. And Joe took some home, and we gave some to our friends across the street. So there was WAY more than enough fish. It would have been greedy and wasteful to keep more.

But anyway.

I'll spare you all the gory photos of Bill and Joe gutting the fish. For some reason, I took many pictures of the process. It's probably a reflex.

The kids watched a bit (including one of the boys from across the street), but it got old for them and they went off to do other things.

The larger of the two salmon was actually a female - and she had eggs. We kept them and later on I sauteed them in a bit of butter and served them over rice.

Here they are, before I cooked them:

I also took pictures of the fish after they'd been cleaned and placed in a big bowl.

I just like the textures and patterns and all that.

Bill cooked the fish two ways.

First, while he was cleaning them, he filleted two of the trout and cut the fillets into smaller pieces.

Then he laid them out on a foil-lined baking sheet, brushed them with a bit of soy sauce, put them under the broiler, and cooked them for a few minutes.

(While Bill was cooking, Joe, who'd had less than 2 hours' sleep the night before, was trying to rest in the back yard, and my children were torturing him.)

Inside, Bill made some sushi rice...

And combined them into bite-sized portions on a pretty bamboo platter I bought recently for just this sort of meal.

And then topped them with a delicious, syrupy, teriyaki-ish Japanese barbecue sauce that I have to dig out the recipe for so I can share it with you because it is SO yummy. It's like when you have the barbecued eel at a sushi bar. That dark brown glaze.