“Let me tell you what you can do with carp,” says Stan Krause as he wields a long sharp knife, effortlessly cleaning one of the fish.

You can bake them, he says. You can pickle them or can them or smoke them or deep-fry them.

“You can make soup out of them, which I do,” he said.

Krause loves carp. He has since he was a boy. He goes carp fishing twice a week.  

And he spent Saturday trying to spread that love to others, to people like Alison Kuhlman and her three children, who did not grow up loving carp.

“Their dad thinks they’re nasty fish, so we always get rid of them,” she said.

She didn’t get rid of the carp she caught Saturday at Pawnee Lake.

Instead, she took it to Krause, who showed her how to remove the fins and scales, and how to score the flesh so the bones can cook and get soft enough to eat. He packed Kuhlman’s carp in ice, so she could take it home, and he named off the many fine ways to prepare carp as he did so.

Meanwhile, volunteers from the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission deep-fried carp caught earlier Saturday morning, breading it first in pancake mix.

They served the fresh-caught carp with coleslaw and Krause’s homemade carp chowder during an event called Carp-O-Rama, which Game and Parks started three years ago in an effort to turn more Nebraska anglers on to the charms of carp.

Carp are not among the most popular of Nebraska fish.

Maybe it’s because they have so many bones. Maybe it’s because, left to their own devices, carp will take over a lake, destroying habitat for other fish. Maybe it’s because they can sometimes have a muddy flavor.

Whatever the reason, said Dick Turpin, another carp enthusiast who is retired from Game and Parks, people in Nebraska don’t like them.

Including, for many years, Turpin himself, who remembers catching carp — but never eating them — when he was a boy growing up near Bassett.

In retrospect, he said, he should have cooked those carp he caught in cold, clean Sandhills streams. They were likely good-tasting.

Since then, he said, he’s learned to appreciate carp, an appreciation that he, like Krause, shares with the general public each year at Carp-O-Rama.

They’re a good sport fish, he says.

“They just fight, and so they’re really fun to catch.”

They’re good no matter how you prepare them, he says.

And then the popular outdoor celebrity tells the story of the one time he got a carp all ready to fry and realized he didn’t have anything to bread it with except for blueberry pancake mix.

So he went with it.

“I rolled that carp in that blueberry pancake mix, and my God that was good,” he says.

Turpin estimated about 200 people turned out for Carp-O-Rama 2008.

 Among them was Arron Slater, who also attended the first Carp-O-Rama three years ago.

 Krause showed him how to clean a carp at that first Carp-O-Rama.

This year, Slater helped other newcomers to carp fishing clean their fish. He offered advice on smoking carp. He told other carp anglers about the 18-pound carp that his wife caught last year.

Carp are catching on, Turpin said, and Carp-O-Rama is growing each year.

This is especially satisfying to Krause, who has always appreciated carp, and who is always sad to hear stories of carp let go or left unused.

“What a waste,” he said.

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.