An exotic encounter

One morning when I was browsing around the marketplace, there was some weird-looking item at a fishmonger's stall. There was the sign "skate wing on sale", and exactly two pieces in the tray. It looked like the fishermen had caught an exotic fish by accident that morning, and decided to sell it away at a lower price since it's not popular. The meat and the skin was very fresh. I do not believe in hunting species to extinction just because they are exotic. But this particularly one was already slaughtered and would head for the trash anyway, if not sold by the end of the day. So I decided to rescue it from its undeserved fate. The fishmonger was not willing to help me fillet it, since it was a cheap sale. I came home with this huge thing, wondering what it was. Its skin was very thick and slummy, totally inedible because of the small hooks all over it. I asked my father what to do. He reached for his encyclopedia to find out what is a skate, and then blissfully told me how to skin the wing. After that, he said, it could be eaten just like any other fish.

The skate skin was tough like rubber. It took me some hours to work on it, while trying to keep it chilled at the same time. After removing the skin, what was left was a few pounds of fillet, very fresh and muscular. Such meat would do very well pan-frying. The skin was another few pounds. It's such a waste to throw it away. So I boiled the skin with an onion. As it turned out, the skin dissolved into a gel with heat. After filtering away the small hooks, I got a thick fish stock jelly, that provided us a few days of seafood soup.

That evening, I told my husband our dinner was to be pan-fried skate wing with butter sauce. He nodded with a smile, though his eyes were speaking: "Skate? What's that!" At the dinner table, he took a few minutes to examine his dish. It smelled great, but looked strange. Then he took a bite. Wow! It was a rare treat. To this day my husband still boasts about that dinner. We like it, though I am also glad that I've never seen another skate since then.