A Good Fish Sandwich...

No, this is not my breakfast this morning, it's my lunch yesterday. Nothing like making a fish sandwich out of a few left over fish fillets. It's simple, you got the fish, toast some bread, a big slice of purple onion, some pickle, a squirt of thousand island dressing, and a dash of hot sauce. Good, good.

Me and the fish sandwich go back quite a ways. I can remember being a young man, all lonesome and hungry, coming home from the lake with an old white bass and a gasper gou and whipping off four fillets, frying them up and inventing the delight you see pictured above. 

I kind of remember a cooking and kite flying contest, held on Texas Independence Day and sponsered by Suzi Q where I had worked all night at the mill (dsyd long past) and I got off work and fried up a bunch of white bass sandwiches on French bread. I won something for that creation, a Texas cookbook that is still good for an idea or two now and then. 

Then there was that time in Casamento's in New Orleans. Casamento's was on Magazine St., famous since 1919 for oysters, shrimp and catfish loafs. I was in there and needed to take a leak. The route to the bathroom was through the kitchen. There on the gas stoves sat big deep iron skillets, just like the one I own, full of hot grease. You had to walk carefully and not because you needed to go so bad or because of all the beer you drank in the old fashioned short glasses, but because the grease that was soaked into the floor from the frying seafood since 1919. 

Here is a link to a look inside Casamento's:

http://www.casamentosrestaurant.com/tour/tour.html

I actually have a picture of me and some other folks, who as soon as they pay their $39,000 will get posted on this site, sitting in those chairs you see along the wall. There is another picture of the kitchen I walked through.

I guess these remembrances, when looked at in retrospect show that I was not really ever lonesome and hungry. It just seems so when you are eating gasper gou. Now I spend my time frying the catfish my baby catches, making the floor round here greasy as that kitchen in New Orleans.