I'll Have Mine Filleted Please.

I was going to save this for later, but, after the dinner I just had....

I normally don't eat fish. I was spoiled in my childhood by having a grandfather who was a fisherman in Hawaii. Needless to say, a lot of fish just doesn't taste good to me, so, with the exception of sushi, I tend to just avoid it all together.

In Russia, I can't exactly turn down my hosts food. I will go into more detail about what I normally have to force myself to eat in a later post, but dinner tonight was so... I don't even know how to describe it. Let me just say, I'm happy she doesn't eat at the same time I do.

It could be my fish snobbery, but I'm use to this

Becoming something like this

With or without the skin.

To me, this is normal. This is how I've always known fish to be and how I thought fish was typically served. With the bone, blood and guts missing.

In Russia, my experience has been really different. The majority of the fish eating I have done in St. Petersburg has been at home. In the form of fish soup. There is no picture of the fish soup that I had, because no one wants to post a picture of fish soup with the bone still in it. But, no matter who's place I've had fish at, this seems to be very common.

I can make myself eat a little bit of bone. Spine. No. But the little bones are very hard to pick out. Tonight, on the other hand, was special. I literally had to pull out the fish, open it up, and remove all of the things that should not be served with a cooked fish, with the exception of if the fist is being served whole on a platter. The only think I was missing was tail fin and head.

Since I think that floating scales are a bad sign, I would just like to include this video of how to filet a fish so that anyone can learn with what to begin with when you make a meal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WABTRGUyUTc

Note: I am not trying to be culturally insensitive. I would just appreciate not having to remove the guts as well as the bone.