Cobia porridge and my first taste of tripletails

After all the fishing, especially last week's, my house's freezer is full of fishes, my car smells slightly fishy and I can't get the smell of blood and fish out of my nose. I've also eaten so much fish that I've got fish coming out of my ears. And all this is after me and my mum having given some of the fish away.

Anyway, I got to eat some of my catches today for lunch and for dinner. My mother was intrigued by the tripletails which the boatman had advised that we fillet and fry and which I had read on the net should be fried with batter. As such, she cooked not one or two but three of the many tripletails I'd caught (click here to read the catch report) for lunch - 1 medium sized one and 2 smaller ones. She also cooked a whole bowl of the prawns that I'd caught on one of my prawning trips more than a month ago.

I thought the fishes looked really strange (see the close up pic I took below), nothing like what I'd caught and then I realised why - the triple tails - the anal and dorsal fins as well as the fishes' tails were missing. When I asked my mum about this, she told me that there was so much fish in the freezer and the tails take up unnecessary space so she asked the fishmonger to cut all the tails off. I'm not sure if the groupers and snappers are now missing their tails too!

The flesh / meat of a triple tail is said to be white (see pic below) and without smell (ie doesn't taste fishy). My mother fried both these fishes with curry powder which lent the fish some taste because the meat certainly wasn't sweet or succulent but rather ordinary. The kind that really needs to be fried with batter and eaten with chilli or mayo.

As for the larger tripletail, my mum fried it and put it in some gravy she made out of dark sauce, sugar etc. I didnt like the taste of the gravy very much although she did and as I'd said earlier, the tripletail flesh doesnt have any taste so much depends on the sauce it is cooked in and the condiments.

For dinner, my mother cooked some of the cobia I'd caught in a soup with fish maw, veg and mushrooms. And wow, let me just say that I would rather catch another cobia again than a tripletail if I were catching to eat (the fight of the tripletail, as per my catch report here is better). The meat of the cobia is tender and sweet and although my mum didnt cook the meat in thick warm porridge which is the recommended cooking method for cobia meat, we added rice to the soup and it was extremely good! :)