This is an easy dish to make as long as you can afford the trout. They don’t give it away at Whole Foods or anywhere else for that matter. Lucky you if you caught a few or were gifted some fillets, fresh or frozen, but if you love speckled trout, rank it with your very favorite fish, local restaurants are going to disappoint you because they only run it as a special and not very often. And it is a lot cheaper to cook it at the house. Now this is an excellent fish to deep fry, and it holds up well on the grill as long as you’re careful with it. If you are planning on grilling it, freezing it for one day will firm up the meat and make it less likely to fall apart on you. But I prefer to pan fry it. You can do that with or without batter.
I like to use a little roasted garlic olive oil to keep the butter from burning. Chunk cut the fish, season it and sear it in the pan. Before you get to that stage though, you want to get the mushroom rice going. I learned and loved mushroom rice when I was a kid in my teens. Cut up a pound of mushrooms, a bunch of green onions, open one can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom, one of beef broth, fill one of the cans with long grain white rice, mix it all in a Pyrex dish and bake it in the oven for forty-five minutes to an hour. Once I bought a rice maker, I moved on from that. Now I use a boxed product with beef broth instead of water and get my mushrooms from the Farmers Market and sautée them with some chopped garlic and red onion before putting it all in the machine and pressing the button. I’ve been happy with the results.
