Fish Skins, Fish Skins, Eat Them Up, Yum

There was an abundance of leftover trout after a banquet tonight at work so I got to take a couple pieces home. They were the kind of fillets with skin on one side, which Wiley enjoyed mightily (he got his own whole portion and devoured it in a nanosecond) but I peeled off.

For more than half my life, I would get freaked out by the sight of a piece of fish with, you know, skin on it. Eeew! Then I started to travel a lot in Scandinavia and quickly learned that it's eat fish with skin on it or go hungry.

I still don't eat the skin (I tried it a couple times but just don't like the taste or texture) even though fish is my main source of protein (along with Quorn and unseemly amounts of cheese). But now I find whenever I'm peeling it off, or watching the cooks fabricate the whole wild fish that we get in at work into neat portions, I'm sort of transfixed by the skin. I start to think about the water the fish swam in... was it cold? warm? murky? clear? and whether it was on its own or in one of those enormous schools, how shiny and sleek it looked in the water.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not having some ethical quandry about eating fish, especially the wild, sustainably caught varieties I seek out (or the sustainable farm-raised sorts like tilapia... jeez, remember when the only thing you had to think about going grocery shopping was what you were out of??). Heck, they're the only animal I don't feel guilty about eating. (Except for octopus... I don't like the taste or texture, and ever since reading this I feel obliged to pass on it entirely. Not that octopi are fish, taxonically speaking, but they live in the water. You get the idea.)

I guess there's just something tantalizing and otherworldly about the sleek, shiny, almost metallic skin, the way it's still attached to the flesh, something that doesn't happen with beef or lamb (and, let's face it, chicken and pigskin aren't exactly eye-catching at any point), that invites my imagination to take wing.

Or fin, as the case may be.