Fish Wednesday: Lethargy Edition

I have, sitting on my hard drive, a terrific interview with the writer behind the Ocean Friendly Seafood cookbook. Good stuff in there, I tell you what, about his conversion on the road to fish Damascus via Orange Roughy. (Trust me, this will all make sense at some point.)

But I’m still down with the ick and I’m dividing my time between scribbling emails to tourism providers in Hawaii, hashing through a Mac software documentation product, migrating information from wire frames into a readable functional specification, and editing photography hardware articles. It’s a great pile of stuff, I tell you what, and there is no time to whip that interview into shape for publishing here on the home of Fish Wednesday. I’m whupped, I tellya, and I still need a lot of sleep during which I have crazy dreams which are possibly brought on by too much Vitamin C. (N, I hope you are done being a lizard and back to being a human so’s not to freak out your wife and baby son.)

But a girl has to eat, and if you’re me and it’s Wednesday, then a that girl has to eat fish. And now, I will tell you a dirty little secret. I keep canned tuna in my cabinet. It’s true.

Canned tuna is the lazy fish eater’s friend. Yes, it’s dolphin safe. Yes, it’s okay to eat. And yes, it makes a fine fast meal if you are feeling lazy and under the weather. Because also in the larder, nearly always? Pasta, good organic canned toms, and capers. Though today I used fresh tomatoes and pimento stuffed olives.

I boiled the pasta and while it was cooking, I diced four tomatoes. Hey, it turns out they will ripen if you pick them green, put them in your basement, and forget all about them! Wow! When the pasta was done, I drained it and in the same smallish pan, I tossed the toms, a can of tuna, a great splash of olive oil, and the rest of a jar of olives. I cooked that until the tomatoes turned to sauce and poured it over the pasta, which, by the way, is whole wheat for the high fiber content. (In addition to making sure we eat healthy proteins, we’re going for the whole grains.) That’s it. Done and done. This is a ten minute meal that you can make out of stuff that’s just hanging out in the house and it’s always Just Fine. It’s no fancy Fish Wednesday, but for the work burdened and microbe infested, it will do.

Now, before I crawl back in to bed with the hot water bottle and an iPod loaded with radio theater, here’s a link to a swell story about the fish with the second longest Hawaiian name. And here’s a link to a silly kids song about that fish’s name. “Why does such a little fish have such a great big name?” My goal? Learn how to say the Hawaiian name for the long nosed butterfly fish, a fish I have always adored.

By the way, the gig at Salmon Days was fun but I was disappointed not to see you there, you know who you are. And the hatchery is freaky cool; you can stand on the bridge and see the gigantic Coho swimming upstream past the barriers. Amazing. I’m going back as soon as the microbes move out.

Finally, I got an awfully nice note from Michael at Traveling Stories Magazine. He wants you to know they’re having a contest and that we should enter, all of us. Tell me what to send in, woudja?

[tags]Fish Wednesday[/tags]