Last year around this time I was jonesing for a good all-you-can-eat fish fry, and I didn't want it from a restaurant. I wanted it to be more like homemade. The places for that? Churches and VFWs.

I did some looking last year and found the local VFW has a Lenten fish fry every Friday evening. Boy was I excited. And boy was I disappointed. The VFW hall is huge and a lot of people show up for it. That is the first strike against it. With a couple hundred people all demanding fish there is no way they can cook it up fast enough as they need it. Therefore they must have cooked it up well ahead of time and put it under a heat lamp. They had two kinds of fish. One tasted good but was cold and chewy. The other was a little more tender and fresher, but very fishy. The second strike against it was that the food was not prepared by the VFW members, but by a hired catering company.

This Friday the fish fry jonesing started again. I resigned myself that I wasn't going to find any good fish fries locally, and would probably have to drive out to an area that is a little more rural.

I asked Sheri to do some on-line searching while I wrapped up at work and drove home. She hit gold. A neighboring village has a nine hole golf course with a little pub where you can stop for a beer and a bite to eat after golfing. It turns out they have a fish fry every Friday night, not just during Lent. What gave me high hopes was the on-line menu said it was "hand breaded". I didn't want some frozen-solid pieces of fish that were breaded in a factory months ago.

The second I saw the fish I knew it was going to be great. They were big irregularly shaped filets of cod, not uniform cookie cutter factory fish. The batter was not overly thick or salty. After my first three filets I would removed the breading from one side of filet before I ate it to reduce the number of calories.

We will definitely be going back. I was going to post a picture of the outside of the building, but now I don't think I will. The place has a really small dining room area, and when we arrived there were only two tables open, so I don't want to hip all of the locals to the place and make it too popular. If that happened the best case scenario is we would have to wait in line for a table. Worse case scenario the quality would slip and/or they would raise the price.

They also have sweet potato fries on the menu. The next time we go we are going to tell them not to bring us the regular fries, and order a basket of sweet potato fries instead. Sweet potatoes are much MUCH better for you than regular white potatoes.