The Fish and I
Fish is my worst enemy. It’s also my dad’s best friend.
One of the first things I learned in life is that fishing is not just a hobby. It’s a sport. And as in any other sport, there are winners, and there are losers.
My dad has always been a winner. As a double Republican champion for Bulgaria, he has a long history of dealing with fish. And so do I.
From the moment I was able to walk, I’ve been going fishing with him. And I loved it. I loved waking up with him at four in the morning, loading the fishing supplies in the trunk, and driving for hours to find a good spot on the Danube River. Even though it was summer, the early mornings were very cold, but I always felt some sort of comfort in that. Hearing the birds singing in the dark and later watching the sunrise from the car window.
We would spend our time on the river mostly whispering. You should be careful not to scare the fish. Most of our catch we would let go back in the water. I remember my dad taking the fish off the hook and putting some weird lotion on its mouth before releasing it. “Just because we are fishing for fun doesn’t mean we have to hurt them,” he would always say, and kiss the fish before letting it go. It was a ritual of luck — it would tell its bigger friends about the nice fishermen.
This was an established routine until one day my grandparents asked us to bring some fish for dinner. This time we never let the fish go or put any lotion on their mouths. And I didn’t really think anything of it.
When late afternoon came, my father explained to me that we had to clean the fish before we left, so we wouldn’t make a mess at home. He sat down, took a very small knife with a wooden handle, and cut through the fish’s belly. I closed my eyes for a moment, and the next thing I saw was its guts spilling out of its body and hitting the grass beneath our feet. And then the smell came. I gagged and got up. I went to the car and waited there with my eyes shut until he was done.
I never stopped fishing with my dad, but I would never eat the fish. I actually started getting more disgusted with it as time went by. I never made an attempt to start liking it either.
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At least not until I signed up for my first serious fitness program.
I quickly figured out that lifting weights is not enough and proper nutrition is a bigger part of the deal than I initially thought. Thankfully, I loved the menu I was given. It had all kinds of recipes, and I couldn’t complain at all when it came to variety. If I had to be honest, maybe I could use a little less of the latter because fish was a big part of it.
Now, I could have asked for a substitute; that’s true. But my stubborn self could never let it go that easily.
I spent hours on the Internet. What’s the difference between the types of fish? What are the best recipes? And most importantly, I wanted to know what fish tastes the least fishy. I went through articles titled Nutrition without the Gagging and Unfish the Fish. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.
That’s how the smallest sea bream I could find in the store ended up in my kitchen. And the knowledge I had on how to clean it didn’t help me at all in practice.
After what felt like forever, the fish was clean; I took out the leftover trash in the hallway and started washing my hands. Obsessively. Even after cleaning every possible surface in the room, I could still smell it.
I never cooked the fish myself. A friend of mine helped me. But I was there to give the instructions. “Fry it, bake it, burn it in hell if you have to, just please get rid of the real taste.”
And so the cooking began, under my strict watch, of course — I knew nothing about preparing fish, but I was annoyingly hovering over my friend’s head. And while I was watching the poor creature fry in that pan, I remember cursing myself silently — it was too late to give up now, no matter how much I wanted to.
But somewhere between scrubbing fish smell off my hands for the third time and trying to destroy the fishy flavor completely, it probably should have occurred to me that I was putting an extraordinary amount of effort into eating what I already knew I hated.
To spare you the pain of reading about me gagging throughout that night’s dinner, dear reader, I will simply point out that I had no regrets about feeding the leftovers to the university cat — Garfield.
