Mullets

I was sitting on the bus today with a few friends and we were discussing tha famous hairstyle known as the 'mullet'. You know, business in the front and a party in the back. It was the hairstyle that defined the 80s and nowadays we just look back and laugh at it. Of course most of us who were laughing have lost our hair totally and would probably be glad to have a mullet now if the trade off was getting to keep the hair! Speaking of mullets I have a story for you. It's a cooking story from back when I was in my early 30s. We had just moved the family to Richmond Hill and I was working on contract as an HR specialist. Julie managed to get a job too and the day she started I was let go! Bummer luck there I can tell you. So I got to be stay at home Dad which actually turned out to be not too bad. Except for one small problem. Apart from bacon and eggs I had no idea how to cook! And when you live on a shoestring budget buying food on sale and cooking it inexpensively is a key to not going bust. I quickly learned to watch the flyers for sales and especially for the ones where meat went for 99 cents a pound. Picnic pork roasts, lousier cuts of beef and several types of fish routinely fell into this category. So I got out my cook books and began to teach myself how to cook cheap meat in order to make it tasty and nutritious. Nowadays I would just go on the net for this type of info but in those days the net was brand new and sites like recipes.com didn't exist yet. So what I used was a very old copy of The Joy of Cooking which had been my Nanna's. I would tell myself that it was just like having her teach me to cook as there were often her handwritten notes in the margins. I have always liked fishing but in those days I had little interest in eating fish. I only knew how to fry them in butter and I wasn't especially fond of fish being cooked that way. But I knew that I could get whitefish and lake trout for the magic 99 cents a pound and that these were fish that other people tended to view as being tasty so I focused on learning new ways to cook fish in order to find one that I could stomach. And that is why I inadvertently read the recipe for how to cook Mullet. I was intrigued by this one having never in all my years as a fanatical fisherman even heard of a mullet! So I stored it in the back of my mind until the day when I was shopping at the Knob Hill Farms store in the frozen fish section and low and behold there were bags of frozen mullet! The bag was clear at the tail end but dark blue at the head end so I couldn't yet identify the mysterious mullet fish! It was the magic 99 cents a pound so I bought a couple for dinner! When I got home I quickly found the recipe in my old cook book and prepared the ingredients for cooking the mullet. Then I opened the package and saw why the head had been concealed. The mullet is another name for what we call a 'sucker'! Yes I am talking about that ugly trash fish that sits on the bottom eating garbage!! I felt immediately that I was more of a sucker than the fish I was about to cook! I did cook the bugger. But it smelled so badly that I threw it out! The family. Happily ate Kraft Dinner that night and like a fish I had been 'schooled'! I have no idea if that fish is the origin of the name for the haircut or not but it certainly could be. Since then I have learned how to cook very well. I know and cook lots of recipes for lots of varieties of fish. But like the haircut I will never have a mullet! Have a great day! :)