The Search for Miss Direction: Feeling Catty

When we were in the 'Mont on Sunday, I asked my Dad, the authority on all things seafood in my book, for a recommendation on how to prepare catfish for today's celebration. His response; "Don't."

OK, not helpful, LJ. And it struck some terror in me; were we finally going to run into a type of seafood that my kiddos wouldn't eat?

I know my MIL likes her catfish fried (what was the name of that place in Gaitlinburg we went to??) but I had pan fried the chicken last night and wasn't really wanting the redundancy or the mess. Back to the drawing board. We had found fresh catfish during our grocery excursion yesterday and the kiddos have been super excited to try it out, so I felt like I had some major expectations to live up to.

And you know me, I can't ever do anything the easy way. I was torn between a couple of different preparations and settled on doing two of them. I had gotten two decent size pieces of catfish, plenty to try out a couple of things. So I settled on Honey Dijon Onion catfish and Herb Crusted Baked catfish and crossed my fingers. My co-worker, Beth, had warned me that catfish can have that rather 'fishy' taste since it is a bottom feeder fish. (And though I was too late to do it since I was literally pulling it out of the oven as she told me this, I'll share her tip - soak your catfish filets in milk for about an hour before you prepare it to help get rid of the fishy taste. Thanks, Beth!)

Lo and behold, the catfish was a huge hit around here. Everyone loved both styles, with Kayla and Grant favoring the dijon and Noah opting for the herbs. All three asked for catfish again, in fact. I think it's official -if it 'breathes' underwater my kids will love it. Everything from scallops to lobster in any way I've made it. Wonder where they got that...

It's also National Strawberry Parfait Day and my parfaits turned out a bit different than my original intent. I had heavy whipping cream in my fridge that I had been planning on mixing up to layer with strawberries and oreos but when I pulled it out of the fridge I found it was solid because it had been on the top shelf of my fridge in the back. Oops, guess it was a little too cold out there. So I fortunately had some cool whip in the fridge that worked. I did mix the strawberries with sugar for about an hour and then mixed the juice that produced with the crushed oreos to make almost a fudgy layer that Noah couldn't stop talking about. (Literally, the kid couldn't stop talking at dinner tonight. It ended up costing him a trip to the spray park unfortunately as he kept talking about how much he liked all the components of his dinner instead of actually eating it.) I'd call today's celebrations extremely successful.

It rained this morning which kind of threw my plans for the day, but we adjusted and made the most of it. We made it to musical storytime this morning and the kids decorated (all by themselves, to be noted. I pulled out all the stuff, told them to have fun and walked away from it. At least out of eyeshot, never out of earshot ;-) ) some visors that I had gotten for them at JoAnn's last night. And of course, goldfish mac and cheese for lunch! Yep, a pretty good day all around.

It's supposed to be terrible weather wise here tomorrow, so I've made the executive decision (the mom-cision?) that we're not going anywhere and we're going to go a little Kid Kitchen crazy with 'dirt', strawberry banana bread and meatloaf. I also picked up a couple of other art projects at JoAnn's that we might dive into depending on how things are going. Should be fun. Chocolate pudding tomorrow. Until then...