Perch

Take:

About two pounds of panfish fillets

One cup of cornmeal
One cup of flour
Three eggs
Salt and pepper to taste
Oil

Pour about half an inch of oil into your frying pan, turn on heat.

Crack your eggs into a bowl and beat them mercilessly. Put the flour and cornmeal into a large ziplock baggie.

Take your fillets, and dose each side with salt and pepper. Bung fillets into the egg bowl and coat well. From the egg bowl, they go into the ziplock baggie and get shaken until thoroughly coated.

Take your fishy goodness and ease into hot oil. Cook two minutes or so, turning once, until it flakes easily with a fork.

Pile onto a paper towel-lined platter, along with lemon and lime wedges, serve with sweet iced tea and thick french fried taters — then get out of the way.

You know, as much as I do love a good slab of fried catfish, there’s nothing that beats fried bluegill, brim, perch, bream or whatever else you call your panfish.

LawDog

Meditations on stance
Now that's very civilized, that is.

14 thoughts on “Perch”

  1. Of course now that I know what to do with bluegill, can I catch any? No, grrrrrr. Used to be the darned things would practically throw themselves into my lap when I didn’t know how to cook them. Now I barely get any interest πŸ™

  2. Yumm! There is nothing better than fresh fried fish and all the trimmings. There was this wonderful old fish shack back when I was in college and they made the best hushpuppies in the universe.
    I think the owner took the secret with him when he died a few years ago. His fish was excellent, but his hushpuppies were sublime!

  3. We use powdered pancake mix up here in the Nawth.

    And we spend more time on Crappie, at least around here (that’s CRAH-pee).

    It is so good . . . . but it’s probably the reason we raise more linemen than quarterbacks.
    πŸ™‚

  4. Man, that brings back memories – Lake Champlian in upstate NY. Got woke up by the B-52’s going out for daily picket from Plattsburgh. My Uncle Paul and I would go out on the lake at sun-up, catch a bunch of yellow perch, come in, clean ’em up, dredge liberally in flour, salt & pepper, and fry ’em up in bacon grease and have them with scrambled egges & bacon. Heaven

  5. That’s about how I like my fish. Around here, it’s any kind of bream, crappie- white or black, perch, bass- largemouth; not much smallmouth here, stripers… I don’t know about west Texas, but here in Georgia, we have trout too. I like my trout fried up about like that too.

    mustanger98 on THR

  6. Mmmm. The flour/cornmeal mix needs a dash (or three, depending on the type of fish) of cayenne.

  7. MMM. Panfried bluegill. Just like my dad used to make. I never bothered with ’em much myself because ya need a lot of the little buggers to make a decent sized meal. But now you have me craving that sweet flaky decadence.

  8. OH yeah. The Marine!Goth and I have a deal – son/him=catch and clean, mom/me=provides company and cooks.

    My receipe is a lot like yours = YUMMMMMMMM.

  9. Just a simple note about oil selection for frying:

    Pan and deep frying are high-temperature cooking methods so use a cooking oil that has a high smoke and flash point such as canola, peanut or safflower and soy oils.

    It is also not recommended using herbicide in place of any cooking oil like the following idiots did:

    http://spectacular-toast.blogspot.com/2007/07/with-shame-i-admit.html

    Sorry, I don’t know how to imbed links.

  10. Westbygod,
    You need to come down east, Shellcrackers and redbreast that I can’t get my hand around. Thats a pound and a half or better.

  11. No fair making me hungry when I am at work and cannae do anything about it! ‘Course, living in a desert, good fish is hard to come by. Been fishing for sand trout for years in the arroyo but so far have come up dry. πŸ™‚

  12. Back in the bad old days, my father was putting in a pipeline for Texaco across Black Mountain in Wyoming. We lived in a motel in Thermopolis, and every day when Daddy came in, we’d go fishing in the Wind River canyon to the south of the town.
    One day he was all excited when he got home and said there was a lake full of crappie an hour or so away. That was an understatement. We drove over on the weekend, rented a boat from an old grouch on the shore, and sallied forth.
    Right away, we discovered we couldn’t put a hook in the water before we had a fish. We didn’t have to use bait. Even the anchor caught one. Yes! We put back into the dock because we were knee deep in fish and the boat had almost no freeboard.
    I guess fishing fever had caught us, because there was nothing my father hated to do more than clean little fish. However, it was worth it. The next day we took a feast of two big baskets of fried fish, fried bananas, potato salad, and cheese to the Wind River canyon and pigged out.
    I wonder if that lake is still there.
    LawMom

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