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| German Stuffed Christmas Carp. If it's good enough for the Germans, surely it's good enough for us.* |
About time somebody connected the dots like this. How perfect is it that we have, at the same time:
1. Asian carp choking the Illinois River and threatening Illinois' commercial/sport fishing industries;
2. Hungry Illinoisans: by some estimates, as many as 1 out of 5 Chicagoans are "food insecure," according to NPR this morning**; and
3. A tradition in places like China of eating carp that goes back thousands of years.
Now all they need to do is convince hungry people to eat it. I'm game. Mercury levels be damned.
German Stuffed Christmas Carp recipe - good God, it's stuffed with bananas and curry. Let's find one you'd actually want to eat...here we go...
The Asian Carp Challenge blog - "saving the Great Lakes from Asian Carp!" - full of recipes, mostly Chinese. Have to be some good ones in there.
* To be fair, I had to look far and wide to find a picture of a semi-appetizing carp dish. They don't photograph well. Maybe carp is one of those Looks Bad, Tastes Good things.
**I don't see enough underfed people on the street to know what to make of this statistic, but it supports my argument, so it must be true.
4 comments:
Susan, I think you have to do a whole post on "looks bad, tastes good" food. You seem to run across them more frequently than I and it would be great to start a list.
good thought, Pete - thanks! Lots of foods look really awful but are quite delicious. Curry, anyone?
Carp is actually a very nice, very white-fleshed, mild yet not bland-flavored fish. You will occasionally see it marketed in Chicagoland as Buffalofish. I think that is an actual indigenous variety of carp, but I think the flavor/texture issues are similar. The only problem with carp, and this is kind of huge, is it is BONY. The one time I brought some home, the fillet seemed to have random sandspur-like clumps of longish, pretty thick bones interspersed throughout the flesh. Unlike a Salmon or other fish I'm familiar with, these bones did not seem to be connected to other bones or emitting from the spine. It was very wierd, and a deal-breaker for Elise and Meg. I couldn't even to get them to acknowledge the positive flavor aspects. It was just bony. I think there is a fantastic business/public food policy opportunity for carp to be used in processed seafood (frozen fish fingers, sea-legs, cat-food?). We'll see. I'm not entrepreneurial enough to try it myself. Or we could all take lessons from some Asians about how to eat carp without having the bone drive us crazy.
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Mike
Mike - thanks for the 411 on carp. That's what I've read too - yummy but bony. They say steaming makes the bones easy to remove, then you do stuff with the steamed fish.
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