By Patti Ewald, Times Correspondent
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Lou Worthington, cleaning a freshly caught mullet, and brother Bob are getting fish ready for a mullet fry at Gulfport’s 101st Birthday Bash on Saturday.
GULFPORT — It's every cook's nightmare: The freezer goes on the fritz a week before a party and all the food is spoiled.
The nightmare is magnified because it happened just before Gulfport's 101st Birthday Bash, and the food that spoiled is mullet — 200 pounds of frozen, cleaned, skinned, deboned and vacuum-packed mullet.
Faced with a crisis, the cooks — brothers Bob and Lou Worthington — did what any native Gulfport fisherman and student of mullet would do — cast those nets back in the water and catch some more.
After all, there are plenty of fish in the sea, right?
Well, yes, and no.
Mullet, the jumping, vegetarian fish with a gullet instead of a ...