The Big One that Didn't Get Away

While passing by a fresh water lake during our travels to Chokwe over the years, we have seen ladies selling freshly caught fish. So fresh that some of them were still wagging their tails, or so it appeared. Once we stopped with a friend who bought some that were still gasping for air, water actually, but they were quite small. Recently the fish have become larger due to improvements in the retention dam and the size of the lake. Having changed our diet to more fresh foods and natural oils, we found that fish in Maputo are quite expensive, so on a recent trip I stopped and bought some tilapia from the ladies. After some experimentation and a little learning on how to properly clean and cook these fish we decided to try it again. The tilapia were there and we bought some, but so was a much larger fish, for the same price, so I could not resist the opportunity to see what it would be like.

First off, it weighed a lot, was harder to de-scale as compared to tilapia and hard to handle. How to cut/filet such a thing? All I had was small, but good quality hunting knife that was really sharp. However, these was still a lot of meat left on the ribs, so we left half of the fish intact and baked it rib bones and all.

One piece made supper plus leftovers for quite a few future meals. After cleaning this one, the four tilapia were a cinch, but will make only 2-4 meals for the same purchase price.