Today is the third day of a three-day migraine. I get them fairly often, and they’re pretty predictable. They’re not as bad as some people’s migraines; I don’t throw up or anything like that. I can function, more or less, as long as functioning doesn’t require a lot of motion or noise or strong light or thinking.
After screwing up so magnificently with respect to the testing on Wednesday, I returned to the test centre that afternoon for the English Writing test. It was on spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence order and vocabulary. I love taking tests and I think I aced this one.
I sent an email regarding the test I missed, asking if there was any chance I could reschedule.
On Thursday they got back to me and said they’d rescheduled me for September 8th for the Situational Judgment Test. YAY. (Thanks, by the way, to all of you who commiserated or left hopeful comments on Wednesday’s post – I didn’t respond, but I did appreciate your support.)
What else is new? Well, Piccolo can FLY. Yes he can. He flew from my finger and landed on the bars of his cage. The only one who can’t fly yet is Oboe. Pretty soon it’s going to be like living with flying toddler triplets!
The other big news is that GC outdid himself in the kitchen last night.
I’ve never been a big fan of fish, largely because my mother hated it when I was growing up because she associated it with Fridays in boarding school, where she was forced to eat fish until she threw up. Every Friday. For years. Needless to say, she never made fish when I was growing up, and she spoke quite disparagingly of it.
I was a picky eater as a child. It didn’t take much to get me to dislike a food. In fact, disliking food was my default position. I didn’t like anything with ingredients in it, like spaghetti sauce. I liked my foods very simple. I could have lived on Jello, pancakes, Smarties and naked pasta.
My mother said my sister and I could each have one food we never had to eat, but we had to eat everything else that she served. It was easy for Debbie, since the only food she disliked was liver. I picked peanut butter; I hated it so much that even the smell made me gag. But I didn’t eat everything else on my plate either. I stuffed it in my pockets and discarded it in creative places when she wasn’t looking. For example, in one apartment there was a “bottomless pit” under the kitchen counter. At least that’s what I thought. I shoved all kinds of unwanted food into that slot. I also flushed food down the toilet, tossed it off the balcony, and threw it in the incinerator.
Anyway. I digress. I was talking about fish, which she never served.
Now that I’m a grown-up, I still harbor suspicious feelings about fish, even though I know it’s very good for me. I think I should like it, but it kind of creeps me out. GC, on the other hand, loves fish. And he has taken it upon himself to help me like it more.
Every couple of weeks he cooks fish and I eat it. It’s okay. He hasn’t served anything I hate yet. I find the tilapia mild and inoffensive.
But last night he made blackened rainbow trout. (Coincidentally, the sky was full of rainbows last night. Did you see them?)
It was delicious! I loved it. He even had to give me some of his after I devoured all of mine.
He found the recipe online, but modified it to make it healthier.
Here’s GC’s Modified Blackened Rainbow Trout recipe. Serves two.
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp dry mustard
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp salt
olive oil
4 oz rainbow trout fillets
1. Take the batteries out of your smoke detector and open some windows.
2. In a small bowl, mix the spices and make a paste with some olive oil. Set aside. Heat a heavy cast iron pan on medium-high heat until extremely hot.
3. Gently rub each fillet with the spice paste.
4. Place fillets into the hot pan without crowding. Cook until fish has a charred appearance, about two minutes. Turn fillets and cook until charred.
GC served it with a fresh baguette, some broccoli and a wedge of lemon. It was amazing.
What did GC change in that recipe if you don’t mind my asking?
Must have been olive oil for butter, right?
The recipe called for tons of butter. Firstly we didn’t have the amount needed and secondly I thought a paste would work just as well. Next time I will probably cut out the salt too.
Yes!! So glad you could re-schedule the test. I am so relieved. You will ace that, too.
Although I have had fish that I liked, I am not a fish eater because in my mind’s eye, all fish live in polluted waters. I also do not eat liver because that is the organ that filters out the poisons in the body. At least, that is my excuse and I’m sticking to it. I bet you aced the test, too. Good luck on the other.
The end of the recipe is ‘Return the batteries to the smoke detector” Glad you enjoyed the fish.
How annoying that must have been for your mom! I wonder if she ever discovered the food rotting at the bottom of the bottomless pit and found out what you were doing. 😀
Peas… when I was a kid living in Guelph all the kids in the Collective would eat together in the living room in our assigned seats. My chair was right on top of the heating vent, so I’d ditch my peas down the vent. After a little while all of the other kids would pass me their peas… we lived there for about six to eight months, and peas were fairly common, so with anywhere from six to twelve kids at any one time, that’s a whole lotta peas in that furnace. I still hate them.
This is my FAVOURITE blog posting title ever. Long live those flying toddler triplets!
I’m going to try this this week! YUm!
That sounds yummy to me…I’m going to give that recipe a try. My kids will eat rainbow trout (sometimes!)
Love, love love fish! My Dear Old Dad used to take us older kids fishing (by the time #’s 4 & 5 were old enough, he was pretty tired of the circus!), for pan fish that he’d clean. We’d take ’em home, where Mom had some milk cartons (quart & half gallon size) all washed & ready, then she’d slip 2 or 3 cleaned fishies into each carton & fill it with water. Into the freezer they went, & when we had enough to feed all of us, they’d come out for supper! But I think Trout Almondine is about my favorite fish dish. Good luck on the next test! Not as if you need it, since your good luck already showed up by the rescheduling of that test.
My brother is 7, he loves to eat the trout that i catch.