Cooking for short-hairs

One of the reasons I decided blogs were ok was that Julie Powell woman, who recently published Julie and Julia, a book that began as a blog (a blog I never read, incidentally). She decided to get through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, cooking each recipe in it.

I thought that was pretty cool. I'm not going to do that, but I am going to post about my adventures in cooking. We were away this weekend, so not much cooking happened (I even had McDonald's once, in Freeport, which was ok despite my swearing them off forever after Super-size Me -- but with the baby, stopping at the local Thai place is a little less convenient, making home-cooking all the more important).

So anyway, yesterday I made a beef stew, which was ok, and then my second venture into bread-making: French braid bread. This was awesome. It rose perfectly, and baked to near-perfection. It was actually fairly easy. I don't know why bread seemed so intimidating. The hardest part was braiding the dough. The cookbook assumed I knew how to french braid. I guess that's gender-bias, or long-hair-ism. Fortunately, MN was there, and she reasoned that I needed to learn anyway, in case we have a daughter and MN isn't there to braid her hair.

But tonight I'm going for Thai-spiced Salmon fillets. Fish is always a bit questionable. My biggest hurdle in learning to cook was handling raw chicken, because I didn't eat fish, but now I eat a little fish, and fish is kind of nasty. Jim Gaffigan has a great bit on his new cd about how when fish goes bad, it smells like fish, so how do you know? Also, he talks about what he likes on fish: anything that makes it taste not like fish.

So I went out and got fresh ginger root, coriander seeds, and we're gonna try this (there's more to it than ginger and coriander, we just already had the other stuff).

It definitely felt like an achievement to be walking with my fresh salmon and ginger root behind a guy pushing a cart with Ding Dongs and frozen pizzas. Although, a Ding Dong pizza would be awesome. Maybe tomorrow...