Tag: West Virginia

A Fishy Little Tail

A Fishy Little Tail

I ran across an interesting little piece of trivia a few whiles back regarding Woodstock, Captain D’s Seafood restaurants, and Long John Silver’s restaurants. It seems that the first Captain D’s opened on August 15, 1969… the same day as the start of the famous Woodstock Music Festival held in upstate New York. The Festival’s last day was on August 18, 1969… the same day that the first Long John Silver’s launched.

I posted that little piece of trivia on my Facebook page the other day with some interesting responses, including from a woman claiming to be from Dayton Ohio who wanted me to add her to my friends list. She persisted, even though I indirectly accused her of “Catfishing.” Long story short, she is blocked from seeing what I do on Facebook.

Anyhoo, I had my first encounter with Captain D’s while on my way to Savannah this past June. To that point, I had been a semi-regular of Long John Silver’s for quite some time. For the most part, I liked what they offered, but one can do only so much with fish and chips, battered and deep-fried. In the absence of Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, and the ever more elusive Alfie’s Fish and Chips (There’s only one, now, in Lompoc California), LJS was pretty much a safe bet… and they were pretty much everywhere. The better half and I stopped at Captain D’s in Fort Valley Georgia. I appreciated the fact that they offered different kinds of fish served in ways other than being battered and deep-fried. Besides, the staff was friendly. If I lived there, I would likely be a regular and know at least one of the staff by name.

(As an aside, I was a regular at Alfie’s Fish and Chips in Chillicothe Ohio and one of the staff was a classmate of mine – Sue Costoff. I’m mentioning this because Sue passed recently. She was an interesting person in her own right and she will be missed by many.)

Back to the tale.

Something I noticed on the trip to Georgia was the numerous Catfish Farms going through Alabama. They were almost as prolific as the Solar Farms on the same stretch of road. While a lot of people love farm-bred catfish, I’m not so fond of it. While I was working offshore, I could count on there being catfish on the menu every Friday for at least one of the meals. One of the summers I worked on the rigs, the rig I was on was towed up to New England, off Nantucket. I looked forward to there perhaps being some variety on the Friday night menu, but I ended up being disappointed. The catering crew would go to the trouble of having farm-fed catfish every Friday. The southern boys I worked with had a latent distrust of us “Yankees” and our fancy New England seafood. I deliberately delayed a flight back to Houston so I could revel in real seafood at a real seafood restaurant in Boston.

I don’t limit my seafood preferences to ocean creatures. The better half has, on more than one occasion, told of living in Colorado. Her parents would go trout fishing in the early morning to catch trout for breakfast. I love trout when I can get it. When the better half recounts those stories, I find my mouth watering at the prospect of going somewhere for some broiled trout.

There was a “Farmer’s Market” held at the Tractor Supply parking lot this morning and one of the vendors was selling fishing gear. I spoke with him because of his hat, indicating that he was a fan of West Virginia University. The gear he had on display was purchased in West Virginia on what he called an annual trip back east. He would clean up and restore the gear before selling it at various flea markets in my little corner of the DFW Metromess. No doubt that he makes back the money spent on the trip and a little more to boot. Nice to have some extra money to spend here and there.

Enough fish.

There is one other piece of trivia I’ve encountered, having to do with excess money. A gentleman by the name of Godfrey Hounsfield had an idea on how to take multiple X-Ray photographs of the human body as a diagnostic tool. He took his idea to a British company that had a surplus of money thanks to a successful deal with a “Guitar Band” of note. Hounsfield’s invention, the CAT scan, was introduced to the world in 1972 thanks to the people at EMI labs. Their surplus of money came from deals they had with The Beatles!

The woman usually at the reception desk at Texas Oncology (where I go to have CAT scans) is a Beatlemaniac. Somehow I think she is secretly pleased.

Enough rambling on a Saturday Afternoon.

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Fish

Fish

When last we heard from this intrepid author wanna-be, a blog about micromanagement would be the topic of his next blog. Instead, a word (or several hundred) about fish.

A friend of mine mentioned going to a restaurant the other day and enjoying catfish – while her husband enjoyed cod. His remark about catfish (according to his wife) is that catfish tastes like mud.

I agree. With one exception. I’ll get to that momentarily.

My friend defended catfish by saying that catfish is best prepared by dipping it in buttermilk prior to breading and cooking it. That may be how that one exception was prepared. The only catfish I’ve ever really liked was at a small strip restaurant just around the corner from where I lived in Allen, run by the son of one of the Tuskegee Airmen. It was delicious.

Perhaps my aversion to catfish came about some forty years ago when I was working on an offshore oil rig. I was the northerner on a steel island inhabited mostly by southerners – some of them raised Catholic, meaning that the tradition was that they would eat fish on Fridays. Being southern, the preferred piscatorial delight was catfish. Deep fried catfish in a cornmeal batter. It was… okay, I recall, but there was a mud-flavored overtone which didn’t really appeal to me.

I ate it, in hopes that someday, something better would come along.

The promise that something better would come along came around in the summer of ’82 when the rig I was on was towed from the Gulf of Mexico to a point in the Atlantic Ocean about a hundred miles off Martha’s Vinyard. It was reportedly a prime fishing area, home to a large variety of fish in large numbers – surely enough to supply a drilling rig with something other than southern catfish for a change. That promise was broken. The quartermaster ordered massive amounts of farm-bred catfish to be sent to Massachusetts for the consumption by the mostly southern crew for Friday dinners.

I did manage to treat myself at a decent restaurant in Boston before getting on an airplane to go back home to Houston.

Houston, and by extension, Galveston, was a great place to get decent fish other than catfish. I became particularly fond of Gaido’s in Galveston for the many ways they managed to prepare shrimp. Another favorite was just around the corner from my Aunt and Uncle’s home on the west side of Houston. It was there that I sampled and came to like escargot and Spanish paella.

After moving back to Ohio for a few years, the first wife and I became enamored of a couple of places to indulge in seafood – Mauger’s in Lancaster Ohio, and the Friday night seafood buffet at the Holiday Inn in Parkersburg West Virginia. On the first trip to the Holiday Inn, the first wife declared ahead of time that she would absolutely not eat snail. Period. End of discussion, until she had two or three pastries which she just loved. I told her the truth about the pastries when asked. Yes, they contained snail!

I have to go the next town over from my little corner of the DFW Metromess to get decent seafood (we have nearly two dozen places to purchase tacos here, making purchasing tacos from the outside somewhat illegal in my reckoning). Yes, catfish is still available, but never considered, at least by me, to be a viable alternative to almost any other seafood.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to prepare cod and chips for this afternoon’s lunch.

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