I remember as a child that there was one time my parents had fresh catfish from some source. I don't know what that source was, but it wasn't from the grocery store I'm fairly sure. It could have been from a relative or a friend but either way, we had this fish one day and my parents were going to cook it up that night for dinner.
They told me all about it, (I think I was fairly young), and I remember them doing some breading or seasoning or something and then putting the fish in the pan and cooking it. It smelled so good. And when I got to eat it, it tasted even better than it smelled, something I wasn't sure was possible.
I also remember the bones. Today the fish you get is almost always de-boned. I haven't had bone-in fish in a long time. My father gave me the typical lecture he always gave me about how if you don't do such-and-such or if you do do this thing, then you're going to die. DIE! Only for most of my life he'd done these severe lectures so frequently that they rarely conveyed the dire level of fear that he most likely wanted me to feel. At any rate, the message that night was to not swallow fish bones.
I had fun picking out the bones, although most of the skeletal system of the fish held together on it's own. I don't remember left overs of the meal, but I sure remember that meal.
Tonight, after visiting a farm, we went to a buffet dinner with our friends. We've been to that buffet before, but this time they had, "bone-in catfish" available. It look just like the fish I remembered from my childhood. I got a piece and it tasted just like what I remembered. We had six children with three adults and it was chaos for most of the meal, but I was going to get a second catfish, no matter what.
About that time my son had an unexpected allergic reaction to something unknown. He was a sight. I took him to the car, slathered Caladryl gel all over him and gave him Benadryl, hoping it would abate quickly. It didn't. I asked him to tell me if he was getting more itchy or if he was okay, but his incessant scratching of all exposed dermis gave me the answer I feared--that we needed to get him home to a bath, stat.
During all this, I had snagged a piece of that bone-in catfish that was just out of the fryer and too hot to handle easily. I was trying to cram pieces into my mouth while looking for a tip for the waitress, getting our things together and looking for our friend to tell her we had to leave unexpectedly.
I finished that catfish and my son got home to his bath. But I'm still thinking about that catfish that flashed me back to my childhood in my parent's kitchen.
The Big Boy Update: Peeing on the American flag. We were at a farm today that had many activities. In the middle of playing on one of the play structures, my son said, "I need to go to the potty." As we hurriedly headed him in the direction of the bathrooms, he looked at a wooden painting of the American flag and said, "I want to pee on that." We laughed and kept walking. When we turned around to see if he was following us, we saw him with his pants down in the middle of the path (which was thankfully out of range of the flag), preparing to go. My husband grabbed him and placed him in the leaves so that he could pee without defacing a national emblem. The funny thing about all this is that we've been trying to get him to pee both standing up and in a natural setting for some time now and he's had no interest.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: The pillow jumping (and the jumping jacks). At the farm we visited today, they had a huge, "jumping pillow". This is an inverted, inflated trampoline that's twenty feet wide by forty feet long. My daughter kept wanting to go back to the, "pillow jumping" to do "jumping jacks".
Fitness Update: Five miles. I'm not sore (much) from the eleven miles yesterday, which is a good thing. We did five miles today and had a nice run in the park. It was an especially nice time to run as we were running in the opposite direction of runners who were competing in a one-hundred mile race in our park this weekend. They were all in good spirits and chatting, mostly because they were on the first ten miles of the race. We wished many, many runners the best of luck in their long day of running.
No comments:
Post a Comment