I love cooking the whole fish. Alli bought this beautiful rainbow trout from the Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley for dinner, and I thought about it all day. But I also thought about a time that I wasn’t so into the whole fish, namely my entire childhood.

I grew up in a small town northwest of Kansas City, Missouri. We lived in “town”, but my grandparents lived on a farm a few miles east. The farm had bison, cows, a few pigs, beefalo (offspring of cow and bison), and a pond. I spent countless weekends on the farm as a kid, and long swaths of every summer, and a lot of that time sitting on the dock or standing on the banks of the pond fishing. The pond had crappie, some perch, was rumored to contain bass, but was mostly the home to catfish. I loved to fish; it was a great way to spend time with my grandfather, who would wake me up in the middle of the night so we could crawl down with our flashlights to see if the reels twitched. I could spend part of the morning hunting worms in the soil around the house, and the rest of the day dodging dragonflies and cowpies and hoping for a bite.

The problem was, ironically, getting the bite. My grandfather had a strict policy of you-catch-it you-clean-it, and so the fun ended at the precise moment it was supposed to come to its fruition, when the fish was on the hook. I could reel it in, but once the fish started flopping and suffocating in the dirt, I didn’t know what to do. I hated the feel of its skin, I hated having to pull the hook out of its cheek while it looked at me with its bulging, help-me eyes. And I really hated having to slice its belly open so its guts came out. The last time I did it, I found I had a mother cat with its eggs, and that was the end of my young fishing career.

Prior to that, though, once the fish was finally dead and cleaned, my grandmother would take over. She didn’t vary too much in her approach. Two inches of hot vegetable oil in a pan, the catfish filleted and those fillets covered in bread crumbs, and fried to oblivion.

That’s not how we cooked this rainbow trout last night. Just as one illustration (of many possible, don’t get me started on the vegetable [lack thereof] situation or the now-horrible reflections on the torture enacted upon perfectly beautiful steaks) of the difference between my gastronomical upbringing and my adult life. For this little (big) guy, I rinsed and dried the cavity well. After seasoning it, I put two very generous swabs of butter in the cavity and half a bunch of leftover tarragon. I cut our penultimate Meyer lemon into thin slices and covered the fish with them, then wrapped it en (tinfoil) papillote and baked it for 25 minutes at 375 degrees. With a little bit off braised red chard (to complement the pink flesh with a deep red and green), it was a perfect Spring dinner.

It came with its guts already out of the picture, thanks very much!