Something Fishy

After much furor and a handful of errors, my fledgling chef career has reached its lowest point. I came from the grocery store and brought home a small plastic bag of galunggong, among others, to cook sometime in the middle of the week. Incidentally, I googled galunggong or gigi for short and learned that female gigi is hard-tail mackerel in English while male gigi is round scad. Of course, I had no way of telling the gender of the bunch of dead fish lying on the kitchen sink so I'm not going to refer to these in English for purposes of this entry but will instead use the fish's popular nickname among us Pinoys.


It was my second time to buy gigi and the first time was uneventful as it should be. And so nothing prepared me for the shock of finding my gigis unready for the freezer, uncleaned, complete with all their insides that should have been taken care of by the grocery staff. I was in panic mode! My husband was not there to do something or, at the very least, to listen to me curse. I had never cleaned a single fish in my life before and had no idea how to do it. All I knew was that there was icky stuff to take out of it and that was it. But I just couldn't bring myself to do it! Gore has never been my kind of thing. I watched Kill Bill with eyes closed for the most part of the movie. I dropped out of B.S. Biology knowing I'd never have the stomach to open up a frog. So how? How on earth could I possibly pull this one off?


I took a deep breath, tongs in one hand, plastic covering the other, I tried to extract whatever needed extracting but everything just won't come off. So I did away with the tongs and gave it another try with my kitchen shears. When that still didn't work, I settled with my hands.

Only when I was over and done with the job did I really stop to look again at the poor gigis. It was an appalling sight! One fish's body gaped open as if it was attacked by a wild animal. One seemed to have lost its head to a vicious encounter with a psychopath. And the rest looked like they were abused, mauled, tortured by a person who had gone amok.


I was home alone and was near tears. By the time my husband showed up, I was in a foul mood and I refused to speak to him until I fell asleep. It took me quite some time to accept that I just did not take to cooking—and other related tasks—like a fish to water.