So, onto the food. I've been making more of an effort to document the interesting new foods we eat because I'd like to share with everyone that you don't have to limit yourself to what you find at the grocery store. Fishing and hunting are fantastic ways to obtain protein, and you have way more fun than you do crusing the aisles at the local food mart.

This past weekend we were up in West-by-God Virginia at my parents cabin. Their cabin is in a community with a 150 acre lake, which is stocked with various fish. Rainbow trout, brook trout, and large mouth bass are all easy to find, and we hear there are catfish too. This lake is almost perfectly clear, fed with rainwater and snowmelt and is really, really cold. If there's a good place to eat the fish that you catch, this is it.

We didn't get in until pretty late on Friday, so Saturday was our first opportunity. I'd like to start by mentioning Sawyer loves to fish as much as we do. You'll see that in one of the upcoming pictures. He wanders around and investigates why our lures are stuck. Hopefully he doesn't scare away too many fish.

We always go to the same place along the lake, but soon that will change. Ejdo "procured" a depth finder and has retro-fit it so we can use it on my parents canoe. So next time we go up there, we'll be able to fish the middle of the lake. What this means for Sawyer and fishing is yet unknown.

Ejdo was the lucky one all weekend. We were fishing less than 40 ft apart most of the time, but they hit his lure much more than mine. He got a nice rainbow on Saturday morning, but we were unsure if it was big enough to keep. That lucky guy went back into the lake. A few hours later in the afternoon though, Ejdo hooked this guy, and he was definitely a keeper.



Took him back to the house, read online about how to filet a trout (pretty different bone structure than the fish we usually catch) and stuck him in the fridge.

Sunday morning, we were back at it again before we left for NoVa. Again, Ejdo was the lucky one. All I caught were sticks and leaves, but he came up with this nice rainbow trout and a largemouth.



You can see in the picture how much Sawyer loves fishing. Got this final fish all cleaned off and fileted out and headed home.



Fast forward to last night. I decided that we were going to make our fish with this recipe: Pecan Crusted Trout with Citrus-Rosemary Butter. Turned out to be a pretty time consuming creation, but it was fantastic. The fish was quite light, and was almost overpowered by the pecans. The butter was a real PITA to make but tasted fantastic. And the cabbage mixture was really, really good, despite the lack of ingredients. Served with a side of potato (we recieved half a massive potato in the CSA and it was more than enough for both of us as a side).



So our first adventure with cooking trout was a pretty successful one. I think next time we will prepare it whole fish style, with less powerful ingredients, so that we can really highlight the fish. Regardless, it was yummy.