Category Archives: Fishing

Salmon Head Soup

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DESPITE A LONG list of ingredients and a double strain, this is actually a fairly easy soup to make.

2-3 salmon heads, cut in half
2 tbsp peanut or vegetable oil
1 tsp sesame oil (optional)
1 3-inch thumb of ginger, peeled and sliced
2 leeks, tops discarded, chopped
4 green onions, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, chopped
2 Thai red peppers, thinly sliced
Chinese cooking wine
2 tbsp fish sauce (optional)
rice vinegar (optional)
aji-mirin (optional)
1 can Szechuan prepared vegetable (optional)
1 can bamboo shoots
1/2 head Napa cabbage, shredded
1 handful cilantro for garnish, stemmed, with stems reserved
1 package Asian noodles (e.g., udon, soba, ramen)

1. Over medium-high heat, brown fish heads and ginger in oil for a few minutes, turning at least once. De-glaze pot with a splash of wine and add chopped leeks, garlic, and half the green onions and red peppers. Saute together for several minutes.

2. De-glaze pot again with another splash of wine, then add 8 cups of water and optional fish sauce. Bring to a light boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes.

3. Strain contents, picking and reserving as much salmon meat as possible. Return soup to simmer. Adjust for salt. Add half the remaining green onion and the cilantro stems. (Optional seasoning: Add a tablespoon of each: Chinese wine, rice vinegar, aji-mirin; add a few heaping tablespoons of Szechuan prepared vegetables.) Simmer another 15-30 minutes.

4. Strain soup a second time and return to low heat to keep warm. Dole out reserved salmon meat into bowls, along with noodles, a handful of shredded cabbage, and spoonfuls of both Szechuan prepared vegetables (optional) and bamboo shoots. Ladle soup. Garnish with green onion, cilantro, and Thai red pepper. Serves 4.

Wild Mushroom Stuffed Brook Trout

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FISHING IS ALWAYS on the menu when we visit relatives in Colorado. Usually we pan-fry our trout, but with a haul of wild mushrooms gathered on a hike in the Gore Range the previous day, including oyster mushrooms and aspen boletes (known to locals as orange-caps), we decided a stuffed baked trout was the way to go.

A word about aspen boletes (Leccinum insigne): Most books and web sites list this species as edible. Coloradans regularly eat this common variety of porcini. However, the Colorado Mycological Society recommends caution. Every year the Rocky Mountain Poison Center receives complaints of gastro-intestinal distress following the ingestion of orange-caps, with some cases requiring hospitalization. In the Northwest there are similar complaints that derive from the consumption of Leccinum aurantiacum. I’ve talked to a mycologist who believes that a small percentage of the population at large—maybe just a few percent—is allergic to the genus Leccinum in general. Most people seem to eat these mushrooms without difficulty, and indeed, immigrants from mushroom-hunting cultures (e.g., Eastern Europeans) eat them with abandon. As with any new species of edible wild mushroom, it’s recommended that you nibble on just a little bit (cooked of course) to make sure you’re not allergic.

For this recipe it’s best to de-bone the trout, Here’s a helpful YouTube video.

2 pan-sized trouts, butterflied
2 pieces bacon
1/4 cup onion, diced
1/2 cup mushrooms, chopped
1 tbsp fresh thyme, chopped
1 heaping tbsp parsley, chopped
1 slice bread, toasted and crumbled
lemon for juice and garnish
salt and pepper to taste

Fry the bacon and remove from pan when crispy. Crumble bacon into a bowl. Saute onion in bacon fat a couple minutes over medium heat, then add mushrooms and cook for another four or five minutes, making sure mushrooms expel their moisture. Add thyme and cook for one more minute. Spoon onion-mushroom mixture into bowl with bacon and add bread crumbs. Mix together. Squeeze lemon juice over butterflied trouts and season with salt and pepper. Spread half the stuffing onto lower half of one trout; repeat with other trout. Fold over each trout like a sandwich and secure with toothpicks. Place on greased foil in a broiling pan and bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

Truant Ice Fishing & Bourbon Trout

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WHO CARES ABOUT the cold—or school—when you can go ice fishing? 

And then have a lunch of Bourbon and Pecan-Encrusted Trout.

Yes, I’m a bad parent.

Bourbon & Pecan-Encrusted Trout

1 lb trout fillets
6 oz pecans, chopped
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup bourbon
1/2 cup coffee
6 tbsp brown sugar

1. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Spread chopped pecans on baking tin and roast for 10 minutes, shaking pan every couple minutes.

2. Combine butter, bourbon, coffee, and brown sugar in sauce pan and bring to boil, stirring. Reduce heat to simmer and whisk for 10 minutes until syrupy.

3. Lay trout fillets skin-side down on greased baking pan. Brush on sauce, then cover with pecans. Drizzle more sauce over pecan-encrusted fish to taste.

4. Cover with foil and bake for 10 minutes. Remove foil and bake a few minutes longer, careful not to overcook and dry out fillets. Serve with wild rice and a good Chardonnay, or just continue working on that open bottle of bourbon.

Going Rogue

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I’m back from the Rogue River Canyon in southwest Oregon, where I helped a friend put his cabin to bed for the winter. This is an annual event, and though the summer steelhead fishing tends to be well past its peak by mid-November, we spend a good part of the day on the river anyway, walking the trails, hunting for river teeth, casting a line, and generally soaking up the spectacular canyon action. Bald eagles soar overhead and otters frolic in the currents. There’s so much to see and do that invariably we wind up walking home in the dark, the “reptilian brain” tuned into every snapping twig (cougar!) and rustling leaf (bear!). Back at the cabin we warm ourselves beside an old woodstove. Meals are whumped up on a propane stove, light cast by kerosene lanterns. It’s a First Principles sort of deal.

This place is deep in my bones. I lived there for the better part of a year in my mid-20s and returned in 2004 for a second tour. Fifteen years ago I caught my first steelhead in one of the river’s hallowed holes and learned how to key out wild mushrooms found in the woods that stretch unbroken for miles around the cabin. It’s safe to say FOTL wouldn’t exist without my experiences in the Rogue.

Fishing for “half-pounders” is one of the local gigs. They’re immature steelhead that run up the Rogue for reasons scientists have yet to fully understand. Too young to spawn, they enter fresh water in the late summer and loiter all winter, eating just enough to stay alive, then drop back down to the salt to finish maturing before their actual spawning run the next year. It’s a puzzling phenomenon that occurs in only a handful of watersheds along the Oregon-California border, most famously in the Klamath and Rogue rivers. Fly-fishermen in particular admire the half-pounders, which generally tape out between 12 and 16 inches and lustily take a fly, providing good sport when the big fish aren’t ready to play.

I don’t eat a lot of half-pounders because I’d rather catch them as bigger adults of several pounds. But a trip to the Rogue wouldn’t be the same without a hatchery fish for breakfast one morning. Like the adults, their flesh is pink from eating shrimp and other saltwater crustaceans. The taste is more subtle than salmon—imagine fresh sautéed rainbow trout with a hint of the sea to it, an essence of shrimp or crab that expands the flavor without losing that fine, nutty troutness. It’s a noble taste that should be enjoyed with good friends.

In my next post I’ll be discussing a type of mushroom—common in the Rogue River Canyon—that might kill you if your identification isn’t up to snuff.

Oh Canada!

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I love Canada. At my old bookstore job I used to work regularly with Canadian publishers, who came down to Seattle each season to present their latest frontlist books. We’d go out to some nice restaurants on the publisher’s dime, and I can say unequivocally that those Canadians put me under the table each time. The next day they’d be chipper as ever at the day-long meeting while I felt like slapping a cold t-bone across my face. My Canadian friends mountain bike over teeter-totter logs suspended a dozen feet above the ground, surf the icy waters of Vancouver Island’s west coast, and ski like bandits on a getaway run.

I just wish I could get up there more often, if only to let some of that Canadian gnarliness rub off on me and my kids. Happily, in recent years a tradition has sprung up among four Seattle families who share a waterside cabin for the better part of a week each summer in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. There’s an outhouse and a well with a hand-pump. A variety of mismatched camp stoves function as the kitchen. Everyone agrees that to update a single feature would be sacrilege. In the U.S. it’s getting harder to find such rustic accommodations; not so in Canada.

The real magic of this setup is watching our nine American kids do without their accustomed gewgaws and explore the natural environment. Games of tag and sardines go on among the old-growth Douglas-firs. Hide-and-seek in head-high salal bushes is a real challenge. They build “fairy houses” on the property and keep eyes peeled for the legendary Island Trolls. But it’s the water that’s most tempting.

This year the older kids showed a surprising interest in catching their own food. They dug clams for hours, used a dropnet to gather bait, fished for bottomfish, and set a crab trap. They even ate oyster po’ boys. In a “Lord of the Flies” moment that might freak out some parents, one little girl—a few days shy of starting kindergarten—caught a kelp greenling from shore, using a clam she had dug up for bait. All the other kids clamored ’round, each one administering a blow to the head to do it in. We grilled the greenling that night and they all ate of it with gusto under the stars. Rockfish and flounder landed on the menu as well, as did three species of clam: mahogany, littleneck, and horse. The adults had to hide batches of steamed clams just to have a few to eat.

Bottoms Up!

I don’t own a boat and rarely have access to one, so one of the real treats is taking an ancient battle-scarred Whaler out to the bottomfish grounds, where it’s virtually impossible to get skunked. Every kid caught a fish, bouncing weights along the bottom and using clams for bait. Sometimes you get more than you bargain for; one of the flounders came up half-eaten and it’s not uncommon to haul in the occasional dogfish. Sadly, as in much of the Northwest, the salmon runs have been badly depleted and we don’t even make the effort of time and gas to look for the remaining few.

The Myth of the “R” Month

Spend any time harvesting oysters and you’re bound to hear the old saw about “R” months, that you should avoid oysters in any month without the letter “R”: May, June, July, August—the summer season, effectively.

Bah!

Now it may be true that in earlier days without reliable refrigeration and fast transportation, the warm months were the most likely to see fish spoilage. Similarly, the warm months are when we usually get the algae blooms that can cause red tides, which were less closely monitored in the past. Neither of these issues should obtain now.

The only other factor is the oyster spawn. When the water is warm enough, oysters undergo a physiological change in preparation for spawning, with their organs largely given over to the task of reproduction, resulting in a milky, somewhat mushy meat (see above). It is during this stage that many oyster lovers spurn their cherished bivalve. But wait. The milky substance is not the result of any sort of toxin or sickness. Most of it can be washed away simply enough by running the oyster under tap water. While I don’t slurp down oysters raw at this time, I can think of no reason to not batter them in egg, flour, and cornmeal and fry them up for po’ boys. The half-pints didn’t seem to mind either.

Go Make Your Clam Bed

Probably more time was spent digging clams than any other activity. We used big shovels and small shovels, spades and scratchers. The kids dug trenches deep enough to hide in. Native littlenecks lay just a few inches beneath the surface, but butter clams (which we only used for bait) secreted themselves well below the littlnecks—and horse clams, also known as gapers, were deeper yet. Higher up the beach the kids discovered mahogany clams, a silky smooth clam with a lustrous brown shell that is delicious steamed and dipped in butter. The gapers got cut up for chowder.

Bait

Collecting bait is often more fun for kids than the actual hooking and catching of fish. Heck, I feel pretty much the same way about it sometimes—which is why filming these two kids going at it with the dropnet was such pure pleasure. It hurt my knees just to watch them squat down on their haunches so effortlessly for minutes at a time. I was reminded of more innocent summers in the distant past, of catching frogs and building bike jumps with my neighbor Sarah Sulger, the complications of adolescence and adulthood still years away. Watching this scene unfold, only a short bit captured here, might have been the highlight of my trip.

And then it was time to go home, to get back to work and prepare for the school year. While waiting for the first of two ferries to shuttle us back to the mainland, we found a monstrous patch of Himalayan blackberries and picked until the last car had debarked before running back to our vehicles for loading. I’ll post the result of that quick pick in a future post: blackberry crisp.

I hope everyone had a tremendous Labor Day Weekend!

A Nod to the Natives

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It’s Martha’s birthday today and I figure she’d like to see these shots of her boy catching yet another fibby, as his sister would say. The kid is automatic. Seven years of spending every available moment in the woods have taught him well.

I’ve already talked up the virtues of the brook trout. Next in line is the cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki), several sub-species of which are native to the western U.S. and taken together are known for their eagerness. Cutthroats, it sometimes seems, simply beg to be caught.

Which is why we give them the thumb’s-up for the family backpacking trip to a subalpine lake. The lake in question was more like a high country tarn, with a perimeter of dense undergrowth forming a protective barrier against the lesser angling lights. But faced with two seven-year-olds wielding Scooby Doo rods, the cutties didn’t stand a chance.

Chicken and Chanterelles in Tomato Madeira Sauce

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THIS IS A SIMPLE recipe for when you’ve been out all day foraging and get home late—but still want to enjoy your fresh bounty.

4 thin chicken cutlets
flour
butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1 shallot, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1/2 pound chanterelles, sliced
2 tbsp tomato paste
madeira wine
8 oz shaped pasta like penne
parsley, chopped

1. Saute diced shallot and garlic in olive oil. Add chopped chanterelles and cook until mushrooms release their water. Season to taste. Meanwhile add penne pasta to salted boiling water.

2. Add 2 tablespoons of tomato paste to mushroom sauce and stir. In a separate pan, sauté thin, floured  chicken cutlets in butter.

3. Finish tomato-chanterelle sauce with madeira wine and add water as necessary.

4. Serve chicken over pasta and ladle sauce on top. Garnish with chopped parsley.

All Hail the Lunch Brookie

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If there was a fish designed…oops, bad word choice…that evolved just for kids to catch, it’s the brook trout. A member of Salmonidae, or salmon family, the brookie isn’t really a trout; this native of the Eastern U.S. is a char and is distinguished from a trout by its dark coloring and lighter-colored spots (trout, on the other hand, have darker spots on light bodies, among other things).

More important for our purposes, brookies are admired by anglers (and sometimes smack-talked) for their gullibility. Their willingness to take a fly or lure in almost any situation makes them ideal for the family camping trip. And if that’s not enough, most anglers would agree the brookie, with its naturally pink-hued flesh, is the tastiest of our “trout.”

On this occasion the brookie in question was a particularly welcome sight after Riley lost his favorite lure to a huge rainbow the evening before, in an oft-revisited turn of events in which it was roundly concluded by family consensus (with only a single abstention) that FOTL was ultimately at fault for not properly setting the drag on the venerable Scooby-Doo rod and then offering unsolicited advice to horse the hog right up on the dock. FOTL will refrain from comment.

The next morning, operating under the theory that our lure-stealing fish had retreated to the opposite shore to sulk, we tried the far end of the pond, a mosquito-infested corner with tall reeds known as the “Back Bay.” First cast—fish on!

No, it wasn’t the trophy with a gleaming lure dangling from its lip, but a fine lunch this brookie, taping out at 13 inches, did make.

Warpo and the Hatch

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Hardcore flyfishers know about a bug that emerges briefly in late spring, usually when brawling western rivers are running full tilt with runoff. This three-inch bug hatches in prodigious numbers, swarms of them crawling over bankside vegetation, falling in the water, flying hither and thither in their drunken helicopter pilot way—driving both the fish and those who stalk the fish crazy with a quivering, unhinged desire. This bug is called the salmonfly (Pteronarcys californica); it’s a giant stonefly with a salmon-colored underside, and it’s a scrumptious meal for a trout.

Salmonfly hatches come off on some pretty good rivers: Rock Creek in Montana, the Deschutes in Oregon, and elsewhere. Problem is, oftentimes the rivers are too blown out to fish when the hatch is on. Anglers with time or money (or usually both) might spend years trying to catch a salmonfly hatch at its peak. When conditions are just right—river in fishable condition, flies in big numbers, fish looking up—you need to drop everything and get yer ass on the water. The hatch might be over a day later—moved upriver to private waters, or just gone, poof!

When my friend Warpo and I planned our excursion into Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison months ago, we weren’t thinking about the salmonfly hatch. Because of tricky scheduling, we would be going in early July, a couple weeks after the hatch in normal years. But this hasn’t been a normal year, and lingering snowpack in the Rockies has delayed all sorts of signs of the season, including wildflower blooms, bird nesting, and…The Hatch.

The night before leaving for the canyon, we watched a documentary to prime the pump. Twice. The boys over at Felt Soul Media put together a 17-minute award-winning film that captures the beauty of the rugged canyon and the madness of the angling action during the salmonfly emergence. (You can watch it on their web site.) It didn’t make them many friends in some quarters, notably among the locals who were keeping this fishery close to the vest for years. But as with so many priceless natural resources, if folks don’t know, it might just be trashed…by the developers, miners, timber barons, water hogs, and other exploiters. In this case, the threat is from Front Range water users like Denver, always on the lookout for more agua to sprinkle on Kentucky Bluegrass yards in desert suburbia. (It should also be noted that Felt Soul is doing yeoman’s work to expose the greed and fraud of the proposed Pebble Mine in the headwaters of Alaska’s most cherished fishery, Bristol Bay, with their latest film, “Red Gold.”)

The skyrocketing popularity of fly-fishing in the last 20 years and the concurrent pressure on fisheries has resulted in an increasingly technical (some might say fussy) approach to the sport, with ever tinier flies and leaders and warier fish. The salmonfly hatch, on the other hand, is a refreshing trip in the Wayback Machine: big flies, big fish, big scenery. The only indicators of the 21st century are the hordes of absurdly geared-out anglers.

While I’m at it, taking a few shots at modern flyfishing, let me say a few words about the modern “angler” who would never deign to kill a fish. Weak sauce. That’s all I’ll say. If you’re willing to hook fish after fish in the mouth and play them till near exhaustion, you should have the nuts to give at least one a rock shampoo—where legal, of course, and within the limits of a practical conservation ethic—and eat it for dinner. All else is hypocrisy. Warpo and I were looking forward to a trout dinner in the backcountry. When we reached the bottom of the canyon, we were hot, sweaty, and hungry. Warpo’s had a tapeworm for as long as I’ve known him. I told him the fishing might take his mind off his stomach, that we would be eating large that night if successful.

How was the fishin’? Well, friends, let me tell you. The scene did not disappoint. Clouds of salmonflies filled the air. They were everywhere. You couldn’t walk the banks without getting them on you. They crawled up your legs and even into your shorts. Every now and again you’d see some fisherman with a big grin on his face doing a little jig on the rocks, trying to dislodge a few misguided salmonflies from the family jewels. And the fishing was off the hook. The first day we fished 12 hours straight—all on top—without a break. Huge trout crashed our flies with ceaseless abandon.

Toward the end of the day I started thinking about dinner. Whirling disease has taken a toll on the Gunnison’s rainbows, but browns are open to harvest. The rules require a brown to be at least 16 inches, so I whacked this one above. He was big enough to fillet, and despite the limited scope of a Leatherman knife, the fillets turned out pretty decent. We had a Ziplock ready with a mixture of breadcrumbs, flour, oregano, Old Bay, and a few other spices lifted from the cabinet before dawn. A little olive oil in the pan and these babies were sizzling as darkness enveloped the canyon.

Warpo has rekindled his childhood interest in flyfishing only in recent years. We’ve made a few trips together, but he had yet to catch a really big fish, a true hawg. Last year he lost one during a moment of bad decision-making on the part of his net-man. The lost fish stayed with him, haunting his dreams. After our first day of the hatch, he could point to numbers of large fish caught to ease the pain, but not a bragging-rights monster…

Until a few minutes before our departure the next day, when he perfected his “wall artistry,” hooking this brute against a sheer slab of impassable rock at the full extent of his casting abilities. (For perspective, Warpo is a tall fella, with knobby, oversized carpenter’s hands.) The big ‘bow was released to eat more salmonflies and tempt the next lucky angler who braves the depths of the Black Canyon.

Shadenfreude

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Schadenfreude: Hyperdictionary definition: [n] (German) delight in another person’s misfortune.

Shadenfreude: My definition: [n] (Piscatorial) delight in catching bucketloads of non-native Columbia River American shad, which could be viewed as the fish’s misfortune.

This has become an annual trip for me in recent years. I blast down to Portland for a night of good grub, a dram of Beam, and a few hands of cribbage with my pal Bradley. In the morning we get up before dawn, pound a few mugs of coffee and a Viking-sized butterhorn and make tracks for the Columbia Gorge, where we get in line with several dozen other vehicles to wait for the 7 am starting gun, when they open the Bonneville Dam visitor’s center to the public. It’s key that we be one of the first cars in line, because inevitably we’re the only anglers fly-fishing and we need to establish a proper DMZ for back-casting.

If there can be said to be any sort of silver lining at all to the decline of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia-Snake system, it is the shad. American shad (Alosa sapidissima, from the Saxon allis for European shad and the Latin sapidissima for most delicious), are the largest members of the herring family and native to the Atlantic. Pioneering aquaculturist Seth Green planted the first 10,000 shad in Pacific waters in 1871, introducing the survivors of a seven-day cross-country railroad journey into the Sacramento River. There is evidence that descendants of that original stock might have made it to the Columbia River as early as 1876, but the river was planted in 1885 for good measure.

Now there are millions of shad migrating up the Columbia every year, and without much of a commercial fishery it’s a boom-time for recreational anglers. Most fishermen don’t bother until fish counts over the dam hit 100,000 per day, but owing to a complicated set of schedules, Bradley and I would need to make our trip in advance of that magic number this year. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried.

As Bradley says, fly-fishing for shad in water as big and boisterous as the Columbia is “about as much fun as you can have with a flyrod,” at least on a sustained basis. Sure, there’s nothing quite like a hot steelhead ripping line off your reel (or hooking into a marlin, I suppose, if you’re into 14-weight rods), but in terms of action, it really doesn’t get much better than shad. And in my experience, fly-fishing is far and away the best way to catch a ton of shad, much more so than conventional tackle (although I’m told there’s a hand-lining method that absolutely slays ’em).

There’s something about the dead-drifted fly that turns the shad on, so right off the bat you’re playing to the flyrod’s strength. The take is usually near the end of the drift, which means you’re fighting a three-pound fish downstream in the current of huge water. Double barbed hooks come in handy. As do heavy sinktip lines. I use a soft six-weight rod, which means Bradley is always barking at me to bring in my fish, “enough diddling around already.”

On this day we were joined by Bradley’s brother, Frank. The action was fast and furious all morning as we jostled for position and razzed each other each time a fish got off. Shad have soft mouths and it’s not uncommon to lose as many fish as you land. Still, by noon we had well over a hundred pounds of fish on the stringer, this despite most of the males being tossed back. After lunch Frank and Bradley set to the messy business of harvesting roe from the females. Parboiled for five minutes with a dash of vinegar, the sausage-like roe casings keep well in the freezer and can be fried up in butter to make a powerful fisherman’s breakfast with eggs and spuds.

Minus the eight odd fish I took home to fillet and smoke, the rest of our fish are now at Tony’s Smokehouse & Cannery in Oregon City, getting cleaned, smoked, and pressure-canned. Shad on a shingle, anyone?