A Cajun Cooks

[DonDuck]

Originally Posted by Rajun Gardener

Once the gravy is made any seafood goes great in there. I like the sweetness the shrimp gives it.

I could have added a lot of shrimp to the pot, but I never thought to do it. It would have been good but we kept the pot cooking for two or three hours each night. We just kept adding fish to the pot and using the shrimp to catch the fish. The shrimp would have been over cooked after that much time. My friend always brought a big plastic container of cooked rice. The rice container and the coubion pot were empty at about the same time each night.


Speckled trout was really good in the pot, but it would fall apart pretty quickly. A lot of people liked the redfish. I've never been a fan of redfish except blackened. Those were good times with a lot of good eating. We could have been catching a lot of blue crab for the pot, but we never did try.

[SueCT]

I have never had a good fresh caught fish. A neighbor dropped off what I think was a trout he had caught, and i cleaned it and cooked it up and honest to goodness, I swear it tasted like the muddy bottom of the pond he caught it in. I love seafood, but fresh fish from ponds and lakes, i have to take a pass on. I imagine that catfish must be worse, since they live on the bottom of the pond. I would be afraid to try any fish caught and cooked by a friend because I wouldn't want to hurt their feelings.

[upcountrygirl]

Sue try 1 of the 2 following methods or both. Soak the fish in a saltwater bath for a while before you rinse and cook or pack the fish in ice in a cooler for a couple days. We love wild catfish. We can taste the difference between wild and farm raised. We pass on the farm raised.

[Worth1]

Fish flavor and a story coming soon.
Many misconceptions about fish and ponds.

[DonDuck]

There is a difference between farm raised fish and wild caught fish. My wife prefers farm raised catfish while I prefer wild caught catfish. I prefer wild caught from clear water, moving streams. I'm not a fan of muddy bottom, stagnant water fish.

[AlittleSalt]

Easier to do it this way:

Bingo on the Tony's
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rajun Gardener
Thanks for the compliments!!!

I actually don't use that much Tony's, it's too salty. I've been making my own and also using Cavender's Greek seasoning. Here's the mix.

2 tbs onion powder
2 tbs garlic powder
1 tbs cayenne
1 tbs ground celery seed
1 tbs ground mustard seed
1 tbs fine parsley
2 tbs Cavenders seasoning
1 tbs non iodized salt
1 TSP black pepper
1 TBS white pepper


.
It is (((way))) too salty for me and I have always made my own some way or another.
__________________
A Falling Knife Has No Handle

Worth

Cavenders seasoning first ingredient is salt. Try this https://www.tonychachere.com/No-Salt...-oz-P1353.aspx I've tried it - it needs salt, or buy the real thing.

[Worth1]

When We moved to the Ozarks from Texas I started school there in the 2nd grade.
The farm my father bought had a spring fed pond on it on the back side of the place.
You could see the water boiling up out of the springs in that pond.
The water then ran over the spillway on into the creek.
That rather large pond had all types of fish in it and they tasted great.
we had another larger lake built above it.
The spring that fed that lake we made a drinking station to get a drink of spring water when we were on the back side of the place.
The side of the hill had water running out f it all over the place.

On to south eastern Oklahoma.
I stared school there in the 7th grade.
That place had a spring fed pond too.
We had all types of fish in it.
This pond was used to water our garden and we drank from the water that came off that pond when we were working in the rather large garden.
The place also had a creek in it that we fished from too.
These ponds lakes tanks what ever you want to call them had a natural ecosystem.
Snakes frogs fish critters water plants and so on.
Good clean clear water.
Not the nasty mud holes so many seem to think of when they think of ponds.

Catfish eat live animals as well as many other things.
They are not bottom dwellers sucking mud and dead rotten crap off the bottom.
Crabs do that and are related to lice but yet people suck them up.
The yellow catfish is for the most part a live bait fish and we always used live bait on our trot lines to catch them.
The last channel cat I caught the other day was caught on a live perch I think.

[DonDuck]

i'm not that familiar with yellow catfish. I usually fished for flat heads, blues, and channel cats. Flatheads and blues were usually caught on live bait like perch. I Usually caught channel cat on stink bait, the stinkier the better with a slip weight right on the bottom. The channel cats were still my favorite eating catfish even if they were bottom feeders. We also had what we called mud cats which were totally bottom feeders (hence the name). I don't remember ever eating one.


We had an eight acre natural pond behind our house in east Texas. It was full of giant cypress trees, catfish, bass, perch; and alligators with a few snakes for good measure. I would catch small perch and minnows one day with the intent of using them as catfish bait the next day in the large clear water river in front of our house. I would keep them in a large minnow trap in the pond overnight. I got up one morning to go fishing and when I lifted the trap up, all the minnows and the smaller perch had be eaten by a basket full of small black catfish. I asked a guy who grew up in the area what kind of catfish they were. He said "they are polywogs". I thought polywogs were tadpoles.

[AlittleSalt]

A Yellowcat is that ugly flathead. Some of us are true Texans - the rest of the world needs to get it right.

[DonDuck]

My wife and I grew up and raised our kids in the Texas panhandle. It was about as far north in Texas you could go and still be in Texas. The terrain was almost pool table flat for a few hundred miles. If you flew over the area, you quickly realized how scarce above ground water was except in creeks, rivers; and man made lakes. If you flew over the area after a period of heavy rain, you could see many perfectly round pools of water called buffalo wallows. They were large depressions where buffalo by the millions over milinia rolled in the dirt. The wallows were often eight or ten feet deep so it could take a year or more for all of the water to evaporate without additional rain.


Most of the time, the wallows were dry and farmers planted their crops in them just as they did in the surrounding area. When the rains came and the wallows began to fill, they were suddenly full of catfish of various sizes. No creeks or streams existed for the fish to enter the wallows. No mud existed in the bottom of the wallows after they dried throughly. I still wonder where all those fish came from and disappeared to in the dry season.


I caught a lot of catfish in the wallows, but I never ate one.

[Rajun Gardener]

The yellow cats are actually bullheads but locals call them different names. I prefer blue cats and channel but any will do in a pinch.

[AlittleSalt]

I agree Rob. To me there are channelcat and bluecat. The rest are fun to catch and release. If it doesn't have a forked tail - it's a mudcat.

[Worth1]

No forked tail no service.

[DonDuck]

Blue cats and Channel cats were my favorite, but flatheads were also pretty good. The blue's and channels always had pure while meat and were normally cast iron pan size on a camp fire.We would clean and bread the whole fish and drop them into a large cast iron pan. Add some pinto beams and French fries to the meal and you could climb into your sleeping bag with a full stomach. If you wanted bulk meat for the freezer or you were planning a fish fry for friends and family, you need to fish for flat head cats. In the river near our east Texas home, it wasn't unusual to catch forty and fifty lb. flat head cats. I believe the Texas state record for flatheads is over one hundred lbs.

[DonDuck]

Rajun,


Do you eat Choupique? My Cajun friends always tossed them back and hated to catch them. Today, they seem to be a popular fish for eating. I think Louisiana may have a maximum size limit for catch and keep. It doesn't surprise me because I've also eaten a lot of gar balls in Louisiana cooked by Cajuns.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nEoDrD-es