here fishie fishie fishie

I made the fish. According to my Mom and Dad and brother, it turned out awesome. See it below with the roasted red potatoes and the rice.



I made a cornmeal-cayenne-paprika breading for it and pan fried it in olive oil and browned garlic. I'd never cooked fish before, so I had no idea how to tell if it was finished or not. I started making up stories in my head of my family eating half-cooked fish and getting salmonella and dying because of me. Wouldn't that just suck?

So anyways I finally decided it was cooked and I served it up with the roasted red potatoes and rice. For the potatoes I roasted them with carrots, onions, garlic, olive oil, sage, rosemary, and some other herbs and spices. They turned out so great. I never did a potato dish that turned out as good as this was.

The rice was awesome too. It was brown rice cooked with chicken bullion seasonings, just really simple.

So I threw them all together and called it a meal. My Dad, who I mentioned in my last post as not being a big fish fan, was raving over the catfish. I loved the potatoes. My brother took a second helping of rice. yeP, it was a good meal.

And the day before yesterday I made these chocolate truffles.



I made the truffle centers a few days before and let them set up in the fridge. Meanwhile I experimented with tempering chocolate. I'd never done it successfully before, and I was really happy when the cooled chocolate hardened in the bowl. I was lucky to do it the way I did, though, because my candy thermometer doesn't read below 100 degrees, so I had to guess at what point 88 degrees would be when I was bringing the temperature back up. But hey, it worked! I'm happy.

If you don't know what tempering chocolate is, chef David Lebovitz gives a good explanation to the process on his blog-www.DavidLebovitz.com. So read that, because I don't feel like explaining it myself :)

I'm planning a cake to do soon. It's going to be a steak-shaped cake. Yes, I know, it's weird. But after watching Charm City Cakes' show on FoodNetwork, Ace of Cakes, and seeing Duff Goldman and his team making the weirdest cakes, like a foot-shaped cake I saw once, I wanted to make a steak shaped cake. I got the idea to make it months and months ago, and I soon forgot as I got distracted with different projects. I'm not sure, I may have seen them make one on the show before, but I can't remember. Maybe it came to me in a dream, like some crazy scientist you see in a movie.

This month I visited a friend I hadn't seen in about a year. She and her team (she works in a kitchen) made a steak-shaped cake for some friends on the maintenance team, so this reminded me of my inspiration to make a steak cake or something weird like that a few months before.

So! I'm going to make one. This week. Or weekend. You won't know when or where it came from. Much like the green stuff growing on the old cake I found in my oven yesterday. THAT was scary.

Oh and I watched the three Terminator movies this week. My cousin kicks buttttttt.

Hastalavista, babies!

~lacey

"Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity"
~Voltaire