How to fish

Step 12 Cleaning and Cooking

A dozen bluegills can easily make a meal if you will be keeping them, and they are delicious. Details of how to clean your fish can be easily found on the web, but for bluegills, the basics are shown below, and it can be the culmination of the fishing adventure for your kids, as well as a fun end to a family outing.

CLEANING AND COOKING BLUEGILLS

- Use a spoon to scrape off the scales - go from tail to head when scraping
- Cut off the head in back of the gills
- Cut a slit down the stomach to the vent and remove the entrails
- Wash in cold water.
- Dip in milk and egg then roll in flour with some salt and pepper to taste and fry in oil
until golden brown
- Instruct younger kids to be careful of small bones. A fork can be used to flake off the meat from the bones.

YUM!

Comments

[The Man From Nantucket]

Great instructable! It's sad that it seems like the younger the generations, the less and less people fish and just enjoy the outdoors now days.

[GCLumpkin]

What a great Instructable. Good detail, good pictures and good descriptions. This is the only kind of fishing we did when I was a kid. My fondest memories are of my family fishing local ponds in North Carolina with my grandparents. Papa and Granny would have three rods each in the water! LOL I grew up eating fried panfish and yes, the tiny bones were a pain, but the fish was worth it. Now I have two little ones of my own and I plan to use this Instructable to teach them how to fish. Again, great job and thanks for stirring up some fond, fond memories. Greg

[emartian]

Great instructable! Especially like the stories- what a way to show not what to do! Maybe you should've spared the monster catfish out of gratitude- nah. I've angled for all kinds of fish, but nothing beats the satisfaction of a run of keeper sunfish. Is it even possible to overfish them? BTW, what part of the country are you in? Out here in the Bay Area, our local lakes are all reservoirs, but the action is nothing like what you get in the South or even New England. For real action, we sneak into the water traps at the bigger golf courses. Maybe I'll do an instructable on it...

[craigl]

I appreciate the comments! I'm not sure its possible to overfish bluegills - two weeks after I stocked my pond (where the pictures were taken), the bluegills were already spawning. I can dip a net anywhere along the shore and come up with 5 baby bluegills ad a bunch of mosquito fish (guppies). The funny thing is that I never stocked the guppies - they just appeared. We suspect that they arrived as babies in the mud on the feet of one of the great blue herons that work the pond. I'm located in the Blue Ridge mountains about an hour west of Washington DC - Rappahannock county. I wanted a pond for years and finally had the time, so I cleared off a couple of acres, paid for a buddy of mine to come up from Miami (he's a dozer operator and I have a backhoe on my tractor), and we dug the pond in 4 days. Its about 1/4 acre in size, 12 feet deep, fed by a small trickle spring that runs 9 months of the year. After digging the pond, I waited six months before stocking it with fingerling bass, bluegills, and channel cat. That was two years ago, and you can see the size of them now. I grew up on a pond in West Palm Beach FL and there were all sorts of phosphate and shell pits around the county that were terrific fishing. The FL flood control canals were fun also. Caught a 3 ft gator fishing a plastic worm out of a canal once - that was interesting. The weirdest fish was the walking catfish that would come out in wet weather and walk around in wet parking lots and streets. Will look forward to your golf pond stealth fishing instructable!