how i spent my friday night.

Please excuse the messy desktop. The photo of my work area was taken in November, but my March desktop isn't in much better shape, tidy-wise. For me, a cluttered desk means that I'm busy with work (definitely true in this case). However, I still had some spare time to design a new template for this blog -- and add a much needed recipe index so that I could easily keep track of things. As for the design, I tested it on my main browser, Firefox, as well as Safari and it seems to look great in both browsers. I even had Cornelius check it on his PC using Firefox and though there was a slight bug in IE with the top margin it seems to cache alright. What did I learn from this new redesign? Blogger is a bitch to work with. Too many IE hacks in it's code and the code just seems too messy. Blech, I'm not looking forward to a new redesign, so I hope this look stays for awhile. Let me know what you think or if you encounter any bugs. As you can probably tell from this new design, I yearn to be an illustrator! Hello, dream job! Everything was drawn by me...except for the craft/music/design group of illustrations (which are just some really cute looking dingbats). I guess I'll settle for being a designer and an amateur food blogger!

And now on to the recipe portion of our show....

simple fish n' chips
Tonight's dinner was nothing special, just some veggie chili baked natchos and some homemade guacamole. Hmmmm, when I made it, it didn't seem like anything to write about, but just seeing it in print makes it sound pretty damn tasty (it was!). Instead, I'll write about last Friday's dinner since I actually took the time out to take a photograph of it. I had been craving french fries and I decided to take make some from scratch. I just scrubbed some potatoes (skin on), sliced them into fry-like shapes and coated them with a bit of olive oil, rock salt and rosemary. Into the oven they went. When the fries (or faux frites as Rorie likes to call them) were almost done, I started to prepare the fish. I took 3 fillets of sole and covered them in dried dill (both sides) and a bit of salt and pepper. I put a tablespoon of butter into a large cast iron pan and added the juice of 1 lemon and then the fish. I turned the fish over once and it cooked in no time (when the fish is opaque and starts to flake, then it's done). I heaped some fries onto the plate, added the fish and then poured over a bit of the pan juices for some ready-made sauce. It only seemed like a super fancy bistro dinner. We ended our meal with a board game and beers so there was no fancy pantsy-ness anywhere in sight!