robow - I will be demo-ing two ways to deal with the bones in the filets. One is to debone the filets, and the other, quicker and easier if you are frying the fish, is to make what I call fry-cut strips (or, sometimes, we call them flying carp wings, and cook them with a hotwing sauce). I'll be making a video on Friday of the frycut strips part. I don't know if the video will include the deboning process. To make the frycut strips, you simply cut the fish in long strips, diagonally, WITHOUT CUTTING THE BONES. These long strips are then rolled in cornmeal coating and fried. When they are cooked, just break the strip in half and the bones will usually stay in one half of the strip. Eat the boneless half. Then grab the bones sticking out of the boney strip and pull them out and put them on a plate reserved for that purpose. Now that piece is also boneless, so eat it. then repeat. For the piece back by the caudal peduncle, the bones are smaller so this method does not work as well. But they also are straight (not y-shaped) and near the outside of the fish in that section. So I just filet those little bones off like they were anotherskin, and have a boneless piece from that section.

Deboning is better shown than described, so maybe someone should bring a camera and film it, in case only the frycut portion makes it into the INHS video.

I also have some tricks about skinning the fish. For silver carp and bighead carp, when skinning, you often leave those silver dollars of skin on the outside of the filet, which really slows things down. To avoid this problem, cut the filets in half lengthwise before you skin the filets. Then, using a regular filet knife (not an electric) cut the exposed red meat and the skin off of each half of the filet. You should bend the knife a bit as you do this, bending it so that it bends around the white-red meat junction, and sawing as you cut the filet off. In this way you do not waste meat, there will be no silver-dollars of skin on the meat, and you pull the red meat and the skin off in one swoop. Note that this is probably NOT the right procedure to use with grass carp or black carp or common carp, which have large scales (making the lateral line cut through the skin is therefore slower) and also have less problem with the silver-dollar issue.