During that last big trip to MT Asian Market, I had to buy a packet of spiny eels. They were just so cute, with their pointy little noses and spotted tails.
There’s very little on the web about how to prepare spiny eels, so once again I turned to the Clove Garden and their comprehensive list of exotic fish. The great thing about the Clove Garden’s fish page is that there are about a hundred pictures of exotic fish, each one carefully placed with the grain of one particular cutting board. This strongly suggests that the webmaster of clovegarden.com, Andrew Grygus, has in fact eaten all of these fish.
Andrew Grygus is my new personal hero. That’s right, I’m putting him up there with Sanjay Dutt, Al Leong, Frank Sodolak, and Buzz Aldrin’s gleaming fists of justice.
There’s nothing from the Clove Garden’s entry on spiny eels that is not fascinating. Grygus recommends frying and eating the eels ‘"head, guts and feathers"’. He also says, "Only a severe sissy would cut off the heads."
Coming from my new personal hero I could naught but rise to the challenge.
Step one was defrosting the spiny eels. Here you see my food frakking deputy Julia with a fistful of eel.
Next was the preparation assembly line. Julia had the excellent idea of giving them a Japanese style breading.
Once fried, you could hardly tell they were once squirming happily through rice paddies in Asia.
We rounded out our eel dinner with some pork/leek dumplings and broccoli.
The spiny eel tasted a little like smelt. There was a little trouble with the spines, which were like four-millimeter-long bones. Sometimes I swallowed the spines, and sometimes I found them tucked into hard-to-reach spots of my mouth. The pointy little skulls also had bits of bony material that were hard to chew.
We ate until we were stuffed and there were still about half the eels left. I don’t feel too bad about it, I think the whole thing cost about two-fifty. Maybe I’ll use the leftovers in a soup. With enough simmering the spines might dissolve.
Julia and I decided that the spiny eels were better than the bream, but not quite as flavorful as the gourami.
I put one of the leftover eels out on the back porch for the cats. The cats wouldn’t touch it, but a possum found it within minutes. But I’ve heard possum’s and eels are natural enemies.