May 15, 2015: Opah
 

http://cellar.org/2015/opah.jpg

You thought we had figured everything out. Well no. Here is the first known species of fully warm-blooded fish, the opah.

The opah has a weird radiator-like system of blood vessels. Vessels that get oxygen from the gills come back cold, because they have to get that oxygen from the surrounding water. The opah has developed warmer blood vessels that wrap around these colder ones, in a strategy to warm them up quickly.

It gives them a remarkable advantage! Now that we've learned how special the species is, what will we do with it?

I guess this blows the alien's plan to hide in the ocean. :smack:

Dangit, now I feel kinda guilty about having opah steaks for dinner last night. I do all the household cooking and my "recipe" is: lightly simmered in a small frying pan with filtered water, tiny bit of olive oil, sea salt, black pepper and just a dusting of garlic, then the remaining "drippings" cooked down into a sauce. The sauce is the hard part--if not watched VERY closely it'll scorch.

One thing that IS good to look for at your local grocers and/or specialty stores: Atlantic lionfish. They're an invasive species in the Atlantic, where the populations from releases in both Florida and Brazil are both headed for the Caribbean. They get to two feet or more, are rapaciously carnivorous, have venomous spines in their dorsal fin to ward off sharks, and have no natural predators in the Atlantic. It's so bad that the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration not only sponsors massive spearfishing tourneys for them, the NOAA wrote a freakin' cookbook just for the species (Pterois volitans is the Latin). I'm 700 miles inland in a small Rocky Mountain town that's not quite as crazed as South Park (love the song at the start of the movie!) but could get there, and though I've mentioned it several times at my local grocery stores that it's considered a gourmet white ocean fish I doubt their distributors are interested. Those of you closer to water, especially the east and Gulf coasts, might want to start asking around because if there's enough interest we have certainly proven that one thing humanity is ENTIRELY capable of is eating an entire species. This is one of the rare occasions when that would be our best plan--eat ALL the Atlantic lionfishes! :)

Snakeadelic clearly has been following the Friday edible IOTD tradition.

Well done! (Or medium rare?)

(I had hoped that would happen, which is why I posted it as a Friday item but 2 hours early)

Well played indeed.

Pro tip: if your chef is not world-renowned with seafood, well done is safest. :) Doesn't matter if your fish is exothermic or endothermic--and I'm going to have to double check a few things because recent research has turned up that tuna are at least partly endothermic, and great white sharks may be the same. With a Roku and lots of free time, it's still possible to find crazy things to learn on PBS...

Well done for fish?

**hurk**

Talk to my friend who battled fish-borne parasites and their after effects for years. That's the only way she'll eat it.

Then, there's sushi.

No, there's not sushi. There never has been and there never will be sushi. Cook the damn stuff. That's why fires were started and kindling was gathered.

Hells yes.