Monthly Archives: February 2025

Cooking Catfish Stew and Other Fish Recipes

Mama was a great cook as were all my extended family, both blood relatives and in-laws.  I often said Aunt Nancy could cook and old boot and make it taste good. Her husband, Uncle Adron, hunted and fished constantly and she cooked great meals of game and fish.

    One of my favorites was her catfish stew. It really was more like hash, everything was ground up.  Mama would get with her anytime I caught a big catfish and cook up a big pot. I enjoyed many winter meals of it and saltine crackers sitting on my porch at my small trailer at Clarks Hill.

    I tried making it last week with a  big cat I caught in the Sportsman Club tournament at Sinclair.  A few years before she died I asked mama to write some of her recipes down and I have dozens of index cards with her hand written ingredients and instructions.   

Unfortunately, mama’s Alzheimer’s was starting to affect her memory and many of her recipes I have to guess at some steps.  For example, her catfish stew recipe calls for ten strips of fatback but it is never mentioned again in the instructions.

The ten quarts I made are pretty good but not quite right.  I will keep trying.

I love any kind of fish stew or chowder. When I eat out the first thing I check on the menu is the soups and stews.  Fishtales in both Griffin and Zebulon make a good gumbo and a good shrimp chowder.

I make two kinds of fish chowder, one with a red tomato sauce Manhattan style and one with a milk and cream base New England style.  The Manhattan style has a very strong fishy taste and smell, to the point no one would come in my office when I was principal at RESA Academy and took it for lunch.

Both start with bass filets but the Manhattan style I boil what I call backs and wings – the backbones and rib cages left after fileting – and use the strong broth from that process. I pull all the meat off the backbones and “wings” and add the filets to the broth then add other ingredients.

The New England style I just boil diced potatoes, pour off the water and add milk and other ingredients, adding the filets last thing.

I have cooked pretty much everything I have shot my whole life.  BBQed raccoon was  one of the oddest, but Southern Mississippi Beaver was definitely the most unusual, and also the most difficult.  I spent a long time skinning out the hindquarters of the beaver, it was by far the most difficult animal I have ever skinned and gave up on the front legs and shoulders. They were very small anyway.

I have many detailed recipes for game and fish that I make in the Fish Recipes category.

Try Different Colors and Different Weights To Catch More Walleye

Different Colors, Different Weights, More Fish

  • By The Fishing Wire

By Bob Jensen

Another year of fishing has gone by.  As I look back on the past fishing season, I can’t help but remember other past fishing seasons.  Many, many past fishing seasons.  As I remember those days, I’m reminded of how much I’ve learned about fishing and fishing techniques.  And then I’m reminded of how, when I thought I had mastered a particular fishing technique, I discovered that I hadn’t. There are almost always exceptions to a technique.  Same with fish species.  Just when I thought I had the walleyes or bass or whatever figured out, the walleyes or bass or whatever taught me that I didn’t have them figured out. Lure color and lure weight are factors that can contribute to better fish catches.

There are times when fish, any species of fish, will respond better to a particular lure color.  A very successful angler once told me that when it comes to walleyes and color, “walleyes like any color as long as it’s chartreuse”.  Another very successful walleye catcher said the same thing but substituted orange as the color walleyes like best.  Come to find out, Walleye Catcher #1 only used chartreuse lures, and #2 only used orange lures.  That’s why they had the most success with those colors.  Much of the time they caught walleyes, but every now and then they didn’t.  Eventually #1 and #2 started experimenting with other colors when the walleyes weren’t biting.  They started catching even more walleyes.  There are times when fish want a particular color.

Another color quirk:  If you’ve been catchin’em good on a particular color but the action slows, try a different color.  Fish can become conditioned to color.

It’s surprising how jig weight can impact how many fish we catch.  It became very obvious to me in my early days of chasing largemouth bass how important jig weight could be.  In the lakes that my friends and I fished in central and north central Minnesota, walleyes were the preferred fish.  Largemouth bass were mostly ignored, and some anglers even considered bass to be undesirable.  My friends and I preferred to chase the largemouth because they were usually very willing biters. When we went fishing, we spent almost all of our time in the summer on the deep weedline casting an eighth ounce jig with a four inch plastic worm on six pound test line.  When the bass were really biting, we used a larger worm.  The larger worm was more appealing to larger bass.

However, every now and then the bass got finicky.  We would work our eighth ounce jig/four inch worm along the weedline and couldn’t get bit as often as usual.  On one of those slow-bite days, I picked up a rod that had a sixteenth ounce jighead tied on.  I threaded my four inch worm on the lighter head and started casting.  It didn’t happen immediately, but eventually the bass revealed that on that day they liked this combination better.  The lighter jig made the bait fall slower.  On slow-bite days, the bass preferred the slower fall.  We learned that we could slow the fall of the bait even more by going to a little heavier line or a bulkier bait.  Heavier line and bulkier baits have more water resistance so they fall slower.

When we go fishing, we need to remember that, if we’re not having success doing what we’re doing, do something else.  In fact, that’s a pretty good rule for life in general. 

Photo Caption—When the fish aren’t eating what you’re using, use something else.

Getting Old and Adapting To New Fishing Realities

If something didn’t hurt when I woke up, I would think I was dead. That is supposed to be joke but it is an all-too-true statement of getting old. 

Our bodies were not designed to last this long. I think my warranty ran out years ago and there are no replacement parts available.  I always said I would rather wear out than rust out, and still believe it, but it gets harder and harder to keep the parts moving and rust free every year.

That is one good thing about fishing, it can be done at any age.  I have had to adjust the way I fish; I can no longer stand with one foot on my trolling motor foot pedal and fish for eight hours in a tournament. Now I slowly get up from the driver’s seat pulling up on a handle on the console, hold on to the windshield and carefully move up sit down on the front seat. But I can still fish!

Backing my boat down the ramp, hopping out and crawling across the truck bed to get to the boat and back it off the trailer is no longer easy.  Without friends in the bass clubs doing it for me I would not be able to fish three tournaments each month.

When I fish by myself I tie a rope to the front of the boat and the other end to the trailer, slowly back the boat off and ease the truck forward, pulling the boat back to the bank with the rope.  That would cause major problems and slow everything down at a tournament.

Another thing I used to love doing makes it  frustrating to not be able to cut, split and stack wood like I did for years. I never really had to do it to heat my house but always enjoyed all parts of it from cutting to burning the wood.

Both my parents died in their mid-70s. When I retired, I hoped, if I was like them, I had about 25 good fishing years left. That was 22 years ago!

Make the most of every day right now before you run out of them!