Tunas! Not the fish but the fruit of a cactus that grows in the Andes mountains.
I on the other hand, DID just try a new kind of fish for the first time -
Alligator Gar
My friends and I caught one yesterday and these things are just awful. First off, if you miraculously manage to get it out of the water and into the cooler without getting injured, you're not in the clear yet. Turns out that as a defense mechanism, they'll pee all over the drinks in your ice chest.
They’re covered in thick gooey slime, and the skin with the scales on it is so tough that it was used by Native Americans as armor. A regular fillet knife bounces right off their armored bodies, the way it would bounce off a turtle shell. You have to use thick shears or wire cutters or some such thing to cut the skin open, and wear gloves while you do it to avoid being cut by the scales.
When you finally get through the insane skin and can butcher the thing (still crazy difficult, because the skin fights to hold its form, you have to be extra careful not to open the body cavity, because if the fish you caught happens to be female, the roe is poisonous and can contaminate the meat.
So finally you very carefully manage to harvest a couple teeny little fillets (I’ve gotten bigger meals off a good-sized sunfish)… and after all that effort, the meat itself can be summed up as “meh.” It's not bad, with a texture similar to gator and a sort of generic fish flavor, but it's certainly nothing special.
I'm very much an "if I catch it and it's legal to keep, Imma eat it," sort of fisher, but I may have finally found a critter I’ll throw back. (The one we caught yesterday was pretty small, though. If I caught a four or five-footer, there'd probably be enough meat on it to make the butchering worthwhile).
through the whole process. But, they appear to have turned out quite well. Taste a lot like Cheez Its. Going to get my recipe 'authenticated' by one of my new Brazilian friends tomorrow at work. If he likes it I'm keeping this one.
