Easy Asian Sole

I do not like fish. I will go out of my way to eat anything other than fish, unless it is deep-fried or comes inside its own shell. But I am trying to eat healthier these days - I consider myself kind of "in training" before starting the South Beach diet in earnest - and I've been inspired by watching reruns of the BBCAmerica show You Are What You Eat. So with that in mind, I picked up two petrale sole filets at the grocery store and whipped up this quick and easy meal. And here's another first: with all the delicious green onions, cilantro and ginger, I'm submitting this as my first entry to Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging, which is being hosted by Cooking 4 All Seasons this weekend.

Easy Asian Sole
2 filets sole
1 cup milk (approx)
Juice of 2 limes
1/4 c low-sodium soy sauce
1 Tbsp grated ginger
1 tsp chile paste (sambal oelek)
1 Tbsp hoisin sauce
1 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tsp sesame oil
2 green onions, sliced (green & light green parts only)
2 Tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 400. Put the sole in a wide dish and pour the milk over it - the milk should just barely cover the fish.

In the meantime, mix up all the rest of the ingredients (except green onions and cilantro) in a bowl. Mix in about half of the green onions. After the fish has soaked in the milk for 20 minutes, pat it dry, season with salt & pepper, and put it in a shallow oven-safe dish. Pour the dressing over it. Bake for 10 minutes, until the fish flakes easily. Serve over brown rice (they have frozen brown rice at Trader Joe's - cooks in 3 mins in micro!) and spoon a little of the marinade over the top - the rice tastes great with the dressing. Sprinkle with the reserved green onion & the cilantro.

This really turned out well, and soaking the fish in milk first removes a lot of the "fishy" taste that I hate.

The Omnivore's Hundred

Paraphrased from Chocolate and Zucchini:

The Omnivore's Hundred is a list of 100 foods that Andrew Wheeler, British food blogger, thinks every omnivore should try at least once in his life.

He offered this list as the starting point for a game, along the following rules:

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3. Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4. Optional extra: post a comment on Very Good Taste, linking to your results.

My list is below. I've had exactly half -- I guess I have a ways to go before considering myself a true "foodie!"

Please feel free to repost on your blog, and if you don't have a blog, share your personal list in the comments. :)

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (I've had turtle soup though!)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Phở
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (mmm...unpasteurized cheeeeese)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes (one of my very favorite foods)
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese (oh, hell no!)
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (I've had mango, but not salted)
34. Sauerkraut (ew ew ew!)
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I've had cognac, and I've had cigars, but not both together)
37. Clotted cream tea (yum!)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo (eaten in New Orleans)
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (Absolutely NOT!)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/€80/$120 or more
46. Fugu (I don't think I could bring myself to try it. Too chicken.)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (I've obviously had McD's before, but never a Big Mac)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini (I hate gin. But I've had a dirty vodka martini & loved it)
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (no thanks)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs (recipe here)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill (This is another one of those "not just no, but HELL NO")
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict (no no no! Runny eggs! Ewwww!)
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (what does it say about me that I would eat a rabbit but not a horse?)
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Olympics

Am I the only person in the world who really doesn't give a rat's ripe ass about the Olympics? Seriously, I could care less, but it seems like every blogger I follow must make some mention of the swimming or the diving or the gymnastics, and how it goes on and on until 2 AM, and yet they can't tear themselves away.

Why?

Anyhoo, I made it through the first week back at work post-vacation, and I'm barely hanging in there. It's been a crazy busy week, with Boss & Boss's Wife gone (Boss's Wife is our receptionist/designer/HR guru/fill-in-the-cracks person). Of COURSE the servers had to go down. Multiple times. Multiple servers, including our mail server, which went down twice. Le *sigh*. Not to mention the backlog of emails and work that piled up while I was gone. Why is it that you go away for only a week, and yet you have something like three weeks' worth of work backlogged when you return? It's like some weird axiom of vacation.

The vacation itself was lovely, quite relaxing except for the nine-hour drives that bookended it and the hellacious heat. I got a bit of a sunburn when we went to the waterpark one day (for FIVE AND A HALF HOURS OMG I thought I was gonna die it was about 1000 degrees y'all!), despite spraying on the SPF multiple times. My side-boobs are peeling now. (Lovely. And probably TMI, huh?) That'll teach me to wear a bikini to a waterpark in Palm Springs.

I also got a Baby Surprise Jacket (tm Elizabeth Zimmermann) done while on vacation, from cast-on to buttons. An old friend of mine is having a baby shower this weekend. I've known her since Jr High, so I wanted to give her something a little more special than just a store-bought package of onesies. This is the fastest I think I've ever done a project (except maybe for the Easy Flame Lace Hankie, which is normally a shawl, but I just made a little square out of the lace Malabrigo sample I got at Stitches West). I'm very proud of it and can't wait to give it to her tomorrow. :) This is also the first non-family gift I've knitted.

Hmmm...let's see, what else. Oh yeah, Rugrat has anosmia, which is the clinical name for not being able to smell a damn thing. FMIL did a little research when I told her about it, and sent me an email with her findings. Turns out that it can be caused by all kinds of scary things, like a tumor (eek!) and some weird disease that would mean he wouldn't go through puberty (double eek!). So I took him to the doctor post-haste, in an effort to get a referral to an ENT. His regular doc was on vacation, and the substitute doc did not want to do the referral (WTF? It's all Kaiser, I don't see what difference it really makes) but she did send him for an x-ray and gave him allergy medication because she thinks it might be due to "inflammation." Which, no. Because it doesn't come & go with the seasons, y'all. And lest you think I'm overreacting and that he really can smell, I tested him (with his eyes closed) on: coffee beans, ground cinnamon, and white vinegar. Not a damn thing. He said they all smelled like "air."

Mr Wonderful and I are planning on doing the South Beach Diet once the kids get back in school. It's time to lose the thirty pounds I've packed on in the past year or so. Not a moment too soon. Mr Wonderful got food poisoning yesterday, and was up half the night, throwing up. And they wouldn't let him leave work early - they told him to "sip water every fifteen minutes and if you need to, get an anti-nausea shot. Then you can work through your shift." WTF?? He works in a hospital. Does it not occur to these folks that perhaps it would be good to keep the vomiting person away from patients? He might actually be contagious; they don't know. Of course, I think he was being a dumbass for not just calling in sick to begin with. When you hurl half a dozen times before your shift even starts, it might be time to call in sick. And to top it off, he's going to the Aikido class tonight. He says he has to, because it's so-n-so's last day, and so-n-so's parents are coming and everything. Whatever, dude. You can take a night off and let the other black belt guy take over, when you're busy vomiting your guts out all damn day and getting no fucking sleep the night before. I do NOT understand that man sometimes.

CSA

If you haven't heard about them before, CSAs are Community Supported Agriculture. Basically it's a system for buying produce directly from local farms. Often the farms grow organically, and the produce is always seasonal and super-fresh. I've been thinking about signing up with a CSA for a while now, and since Mr Wonderful and I are planning on starting the South Beach diet soon, this seemed like a great time to do it. So today I signed up with Farm Fresh to You, a CSA north of Vacaville, east of Lake Berryessa. It's extremely flexible - they do deliveries every week, every 2 weeks, or every 4 weeks, and there are several different options to choose from (fruit only, veggies only, mixed, small box, regular-size box, etc). And they deliver right to your home or office! Considering food prices these days, it seems very reasonable, too.

I'm excited to start eating more locally & seasonally, and Mr Wonderful & I are both looking forward to losing some of our extra "fluff."