Fish in Japan

There is a lot of fish eaten in Japan, and a visit to any grocery store will show you more varieties of fish and seafood than any store in the Fox Valley. My problem is knowing what the heck is that and what do I do with it?

I am limited to stovetop cooking at present. I have two gas burners. I thought I could fix my tilapia with lemon sauce fairly easily.

Then I started looking for tilapia. Or any white fish packaged the way I'm used to. Which is cleaned, filleted and not looking much like fish. No such luck.

It turns out that while Americans, in general, like drier white fish, the Japanese apparently like oily fish. Salmon, mackeral, etc. Which brings me to how I decided to blog on this subject: my lunch today. I had a bit of mackeral (saba 鯖）with a sweet miso sauce. Yes, it's hard to get the skin off with chopsticks, but it was a pretty good tasting piece of fish. It's scary when you want the recipe for a school lunch!

It's good for you too -- the oily fishes are the ones with the good fatty acids. So now I must find a recipe for saba, and a cleaned piece of it. I can try to remember how to fillet fish from when I used to fish as a kid, but I'd rather not. That plus I'm only cooking for one.