Friday night routines
I have not been maximizing my personal workflow in the last week. I tend to be easily distracted by shiny pretty things, and that’s clearly been a big problem with me lately. Not at work, of course, where I have been literally a white tornado of efficiency, but once I’m off the clock, well, I can’t get jack done. Not that this is new.
But nearly a week ago I wrote about the great plans and schemes I had for taking advantage of the solitude I’ve got going on with Magda and Adam away for these two weeks. Look on my lack of works, Ozymandias, and despair!
Let me just say this: I deeply miss my wife. A commenter on the last post took me to task for omitting to say this explicitly, and I don’t want there to be any doubt. Although in my defense there’s no proof that the deep missing of the “cookie-scent of my baby’s neck” I mentioned wasn’t in reference to Magda rather than Adam. That’s some ambiguity I can live with.
Magda takes my care and feeding very seriously. In this she manages to combine the most dreamily maternal and most sexy of attributes (which sounds a bit creepy, having typed it, but it isn’t). She’s like one of those doughty frontier women from the westerns, baby on one hip and shotgun on the other, working her ass off to make sure I’m provided for and my young’uns are raised proper. All the while knowing that she could both do my job and kick my ass. High among her concerns running up to this two-week absence was whether I would remember to feed myself. Also how wrinkled my shirts would be. I tried to remind her that before her (a horrible thought, but a reality), I did manage to live not entirely like an animal and that she shouldn’t worry.
Since our young’un done arrived, we’ve adopted a Friday night routine that frees her from the apparently relentless need to DO FOR HER MAN. This routine involves a take-out pizza and maybe a video. Not terribly original or frontiery, I know, but we like it.
With her away, though, I can get a pizza any damn night of the week, so I’ve gone back to my old bachelor routine of Friday night. The particulars would vary, but it always involved a late-afternoon nap. Then I would SPRING UP and prepare a delicious hearty dinner with a bottle of wine. Never elaborate, but always special. Some nights it would be a grilled rib-eye, sometimes a duck breast, but for some reason Friday usually meant fish. So here I give you
Line a large baking dish with a generous amount of foil. Apply some oil and put in two medium salmon fillets, skin side down. Scatter over the top a generous amount of coarsely chopped bok choy, the younger the better; half a sliced onion; a handful of cherry tomatoes, quartered. Add two cloves of garlic and a thumb-sized piece of ginger, both minced. Over this slop the following mixture:
1 tsp* sesame oil
1 tsp fish sauce
1 Tbs Thai chile sauce (Sri Riacha, e.g.)
3 Tbs soy sauce
3 Tbs honey
Juice of half a limeFold the foil up and over so that it seals as tightly as possible and put the dish in an oven set to 160 C. (350 F) to bake/steam until you’re done browsing BoingBoing or 30-40 minutes later, depending on the thickness of the fish fillets and what’s on BoingBoing (or Slate, or The Onion, or whatever).
*These measurements are strictly for form. I’m winging it here.
Notes:
- Serve this with good rice or, my latest obsession, super-skinny rice noodles.
- Yes, you can screw up fish big-time with overcooking, but done this way it’s remarkably forgiving.
- “Happy Fish” was the name of a dish I first got as take-out from a mediocre Thai place in Hinesville, Georgia (U.S.A., not Caucasus), and I’ve stolen the name with no shame. In fact, I use “Happy Fish” to refer to any fish I cook in this way, as long it involves a) fish and vegetables b) vaguely Thai stuff and c) little or no actual cooking activity.
