Hi Wayne,
How did you do on the Catfish expedition ??
Do you like to eat them?? How do you cook them.??
I became "spoiled" on flounder/fluke growing up in S. Jersey and always found catfish to be too "wet/mushy".
We did a dinner in Burlington, Vt. dubbed "Champs chunks" after the Lake Champlain version of the "lockness Monster".
- It was deep fried, beer battered 1 in. chunks of fish. Popular "white fish" Scrod/Cod, Haddock etc. were not only too expensive but dried out too much in the fryer. But, Catfish cooked up great in the fryer and folks loved it !!!
At the time, no one ate Catfish in that part of the world, rejected it "out of hand". The main seafood distributor in Burlington suggested it and started bringing it up from Boston for me.
They sold so well, I actually started thinking about "farming them". All you need to do for "feed" is send a kid around to the seafood restaurants and collect the "table scraps", they chow it like Piranha !! Learned that at a restaurant on Lake Pontchartrain above New Orleans that was out on a pier and you scraped your plate over the water to feed the Catfish, triggering a "wild feeding frenzy" that was something to see !!!
Lee