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Column: Preparing ingredients for an outdoor dining experience

Great Outdoors by James Murray
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When and if you do decide to keep a fish, make sure to dispatch and clean it immediately.

Having dispatched the fish, remove both the head and entrails, puncture the bladder and drop the guts overboard into deep water. Shrimp and a variety of other sub-aquatic creatures will feed on the waste materials and there will be little left by the end of the day. Make sure to wash the fish thoroughly and place it on ice in a cooler to ensure it stays fresh, especially if you are going to be fishing for a while longer.

My favourite meal has always been a shore lunch. Shore lunches need not be complicated. All you need is a skillet, a fish or two, milk to coat the outside of the fish, some flour to roll it in and butter to fry it in. A few sliced potatoes (boiled up the night before with the skins left on), a can of baked beans for a side dish and, voila, lunch is ready to serve.

If you want to get fancy you can serve your fish on a bed of fried rice with a nice side salad. The rice can be prepared a day beforehand, placed in a plastic baggy or container and packed along in a cooler with drinking water, pop or any other beverage one might desire. Do the same thing with the ingredients for the salad to keep them fresh. I don’t add the dressing until it’s time to eat. Put that inside a small container inside the container with the stuff for the salad.

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I don’t know if it’s being outdoors in the fresh air or just the whole experience of having to prepare and cook your meals on a Coleman stove, but somehow things seem to taste a whole lot better when you get to dine beside a lake or stream somewhere with birds singing, a blue sky up above and the sound of water bubbling over rocks or lapping against the shore.

Maybe it’s just me, but I always seem to have a better appetite when I’m in the great outdoors.

CORRECTION: The photo printed with last week’s Great Outdoors column, Fishing about every moment of the experience, included information about the Learn to Fish program held at the Kingfisher Interpretive Centre last year. We apologize for the error. Salmon Arm Observer/Shuswap Market News

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