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My 6 yo daughter caught a nice crappie today and wanted to take it home and eat it. We did and I tried to fillet it. Never filleted a fish before. Couple questions. Got a couple okay sized pieces, but nothing like I expected. My wife commented about how much meat I left on the fish.
1. Does anyone have an easy to follow instruction or web link that will walk me through it next time.
2. When filleting, I did well on the upper (shoulder) section of each side of the fish, but trying to cut a whole piece off of one side, I ran into bones (probably ribs) along the middle section of the fish. I didn't cut through these as I didn't want to end up with bones in the fillet, so I had to cut little bits of meat off the bottom portion of each side. Is this normal or was I doing something wrong. I saw a picture on the web of a filleted crappie with the piece still attached and it looked like the person had both the top and bottom of each side intact.
3. How much "meat" should I expect from one fish. It was about a 12" crappie, so I expected an okay amount based upon some I've seen people keeping on TV, but maybe you have to have a lot of these fish to get a good amount of usable meat.
Anyway, normally I throw back all the fish I catch but the daughter likes to keep them to eat so I better learn how to do this correctly.
Thanks for your help on this.
1. Does anyone have an easy to follow instruction or web link that will walk me through it next time.
2. When filleting, I did well on the upper (shoulder) section of each side of the fish, but trying to cut a whole piece off of one side, I ran into bones (probably ribs) along the middle section of the fish. I didn't cut through these as I didn't want to end up with bones in the fillet, so I had to cut little bits of meat off the bottom portion of each side. Is this normal or was I doing something wrong. I saw a picture on the web of a filleted crappie with the piece still attached and it looked like the person had both the top and bottom of each side intact.
3. How much "meat" should I expect from one fish. It was about a 12" crappie, so I expected an okay amount based upon some I've seen people keeping on TV, but maybe you have to have a lot of these fish to get a good amount of usable meat.
Anyway, normally I throw back all the fish I catch but the daughter likes to keep them to eat so I better learn how to do this correctly.
Thanks for your help on this.