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by second to last_Archive
Fish is great food, unless my mom cooks it. The way my mom cooks fish makes pencil erasers seem appetizing. To paraphrase Gareth Blackstock in Chef!, my mom inspired me to the culinary arts - in self defense. I have to eat some amount of fish or seafood every week, because it helps me manage my depression without meds. Shrimp and salmon vs. SSRIs - there's no contest here.
I like just about any kind of fish or seafood. Baja-style fish tacos rock. They remind me of the happier part of my childhood when I lived in San Diego. Ceviche is great too - I can't believe Mexicans around here (West Texas/New Mexico) often don't know what it is. Seafood is the one and only reason I'll go to Mexico. I won't risk getting abducted, raped and murdered for just anything.
I love salmon, and I really like salmon skin. I like making my own salmon skin hand rolls with lot of pickled ginger, but that's a bit of work. Love any kind of Japanese cuisine involving fish. Hell, any kind of Asian cuisine - Thai and Vietnamese seafood dishes are excellant, especially if they have fish sauce. I'm so indebted to the Asian grocer here - it's the only store around where I can get decent seafood in the middle of the desert, although I haven't been brave enough to take home the live eels or rockfish they frequently have in stock. Sometimes they even have monkfish - if you haven't tried it, and you like fish, you should. There's nothing else quite like good monkfish.
I make a great bouillabaisse with roasted red bell pepper rouille too, when I can get good ingredients. Seafood gumbo's another seafood dish I like making, and it's passable with inferior ingredient if you season it right. As a norm, I not a soup person, but I usually like any soup, stew or gumbo that has fish or seafood in it. Any excuse to use fish or shrimp stock, I'm all for it.
I tend to steer clear of raw oysters (I lived in Galveston, Texas for too long - I see raw oysters and think "mmm, yum - hepatitis!"), but cooked, especially fried, yes. All shellfish, including crawfish, definitely get my approval. Shrimp, prawns, mussels, clams, snails (hey I'm French), crab, lobster, squid, langistino... the phrase "better than sex" comes to my mind. My dad's from Maine and hates lobster. I just don't get it. It probably has something to do with when he was a kid, lobster was still "dog food."
The only fish I have culinary issues with is freshwater fish, like trout, pike, tilapia and catfish. I'll eat freshwater eel if cooked right, catfish gumbo and maybe a fried catfish po'boy, but beyond that, no.
There are some fish I don't buy because they are being overfished, namely orange roughy, grouper, sea bass, swordfish and shark.