Fish Stories

Yesterday was mostly a paperwork day. I did a bit of sewing in the afternoon, but it was on a project that has to stay under wraps for the moment, so no pictures.

For today’s blog post, I thought I would share a bit about a Lenten tradition that makes me laugh. When I was growing up in northeast Ohio, we always had fish sandwiches for lunch on Fridays at school during Lent. Our little town was heavily Catholic. My mother always made fish on Good Friday, but fish every Friday during Lent apparently was a Catholic thing and we were Missouri Synod Lutherans.

My family is also of Slovak ancestry. (Szabo is a Hungarian surname, because my paternal grandfather’s family was Hungarian.) We lived in a very ethnic area west of Cleveland. Some of my favorite memories as a kid are from going to the International Festival in Lorain every summer, where we could wander from booth to booth and buy every kind of ethnic food imaginable, then sit on the lawn and eat it while listening to music and watching the dance groups perform in their countries’ traditional costumes.

Growing up next to Lake Erie also meant that our family ate a lot of fish and did a lot of fishing ourselves. My grandfather had six granddaughters before he got any grandsons, and he thought nothing of throwing all six of us into his car and taking us out to a local pond or to the lake to teach us how to fish for bluegill, sunfish, and the occasional bass. (I’m the one with the dark hair sitting down with my back to the camera and my sister is in the orange shorts.)

My favorite fish for eating, hands down, is yellow perch. (Bluegill is surprisingly good, too, although very tiny and hard to filet.) Whenever I am in Ohio, I try to have at least one perch dinner.

One of my cousins shared this on Facebook last week, which reminded me that it’s Lent and the American Slovak Club in Lorain, Ohio, is having its weekly fish fry every Friday night:

What makes me laugh is that I don’t think of perch as a traditional Slovak meal, although pierogies, cabbage rolls, and haluski (cabbage and noodles) are also on the menu. I’d probably indulge in the one pound of perch dinner, because anything worth doing is worth doing in excess.

*************************************

I’m in that transition period where I am going to have to figure out when and how much sewing I’ll be able to continue doing over the next couple of months. I didn’t touch the Q20 from June until October last year. When the weather gets nicer, I am going to want to be outside as much as possible, unless we have another ridiculously hot summer. But we’ll see. Maybe this summer, I’ll want to do more quilting on the Q20 in the afternoons. Or some embroidery or hexies. The days are getting longer, though, and that means that our evenings sitting together watching car repair videos are coming to an end.