Gone Fishin'

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Summertime should be full of activities that the snowy winters, rainy springs, and chilly autumns don’t allow. Playing baseball till the sun goes down, swimming all day until your skin is the color of a tomato, lazily floating along a crystal clear lake with a fishing pole in hand: these are the moments summer is made of. And yet this time of year it is easy to look back and realize that the summer has nearly slipped by without you stopping for one second to enjoy a swing of the bat, dip in the pool, or cast of a line.

Swimming is fun, be it in your neighbor’s pool or the ocean. But eating and swimming don’t mix as any good mother has told you. Baseball is the all-American sport, but eating and running are not ideal. So I try to keep baseball to the stadium so I can enjoy a good hot dog from the comfort of the stands. Now fishing, there’s an easy summer sport that you can not only eat and drink while you do it, but if you are any good, then you can keep eating for many meals as a payoff for your time with the rod n' reel.

Unless you live in the Sahara, you probably have some body of water, be it lake, river, creek or ocean, within driving distance of your home. Even though I grew up in the high desert of California, we had a small angler’s lake to practice on. And if that failed, there were always the “lakes” on the local golf course stocked with mackerel.

I’ll admit, as a young girl, even if I had the patience to sit with fishing pole for hours on end, the whole bait part always kind of grossed me out. As an adult, not much has changed, except for that I appreciate more the work that goes into grabbing those slippery suckers out of the water. And, I am always more than willing to cook up and eat the day’s bounty from those devoted fisherman I am lucky to be friends with.

Whether you eat the catch right out of the water or store it in the freezer for later use, there is nothing like a freshly caught, freshly grilled piece of fish to bring the taste of the water and the essence of summer to your plate. One of the best fish memories I have was of striped fresh water bass, right out of the water, that a friend packed in salt and threw on the grill just moments after it had been caught. The flesh was so fresh that the fish tasted of nothing more than the water it came from and the fire it was cooked on, the way any good fresh water fish should taste.

If you are like me and have trouble channeling your inner Tom Sawyer for a day of fishing on the river, there is no reason why you can’t pretend with a little fresh water fish dinner. Lots of fish markets like to do the dirty work for you, removing the head and bones and cutting what’s left into neat little fillets. But if you want to get as real as possible without getting your hands too dirty (read threading worms onto hooks for bait) look for trout or striped bass at the market--head, tail, and all.

Freshwater fish is easy to grill up in a satisfying and sophisticated fashion. It doesn’t take more than some herbs stuffed into the cavity and some salt and pepper to season it properly, then onto the grill for 8-10 minutes and basically the fish is done. A citrus butter infused with lemon, or perhaps even orange, and saffron then drizzled over the finished fish takes it from standard to special. Since fresh water fish is so clean and light, I like to give it that rustic campfire feel by wrapping it in bacon after stuffing it with herbs. Then it's onto the fire for a dish that's slightly more meaty than your everyday fish.

Someone once told me that, if fishing were easy, it would be called catching, not fishing. That may be true, in which case I think I’ll leave the hard work to the people who have the patience for it. However, I will happily reap the fruits of their labors, and with that catch grill up a fish dinner worthy of the effort it took to catch that sucker in the first place.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 4 whole trout
• 4 sprigs fresh rosemary
• 1 lemon
• 12 slices bacon
• salt and pepper
• vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 pound green tomatoes
• 1/2 red onion
• 2 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar
• 4 tablespoons olive oil