Striped bass and the mystery egg noodles

Chapter 1
The Husband found some remarkably fresh fish in upstate NY (unheard of unless you have an in with one of those crazy ice fisherman! You know who you are, Jack!).

We regularly buy vegetables from Heller's Farm in the Cooperstown Farm Market. The market continues through the winter, but the pickins are slim. Apparently Heller's has a large pond and has started raising striped bass.

This was my first attempt at cooking a whole fish, but we both agreed it turned out pretty well. I used a recipe they provided which involved coating the fish with a kind of pesto made from fresh mint, dried oregano, scallions, garlic and olive oil. We left out the mint partly because The Hub is not a fan, partly because it's not exactly fresh in Price Chopper.

Score the sides, rub in the pesto, and broil for 5 minutes (more like 7 minutes) each side. Served with mashed sweet potatoes and a spinach salad.

Chapter 2
Dried egg noodles started appearing as cat toys on the second floor, mostly in the middle of the night being noisily batted around by some silly kitten. I could not figure out where he was getting them.

I take them away, more appear.


I discovered a few days later that there was an extra bag of egg noodles in the basement. I am thinking the same silly kitten broke open the bag and must have been carrying them upstairs one at a time.

I added Chapter 2 just now because same silly kitten batted one of them down the stairs while I was writing this. The Hub took it away, so kitten went down in the basement and just brought up another one. He left it for a sleeping Sophie as a gift. She woke up a few minutes later and ate it—thank you very much!

MonkeyCat has eye surgery (along with getting snipped!)

Not much to report here on the home front, I just wanted to get that awful photo from Paris off the top of my blog. Too sad to think about...

Monk went in last week for that special operation, and while they were at it they tried to fix his very weepy eye. They cut away a lot of scar tissue, but the eye is no better than before, in fact maybe worse. Either way, he doesn't seem to notice there is a problem, so we will do nothing further about it. They told me he stopped breathing when they administered the anesthesia, so there will be no future surgeries if we can help it. Thank heavens they brought him back, and he lost none of the spunk he had when he left us for the day.

He and WillieCat have really bonded, so much so that when Monk is downstairs trying to get a rise out of Woody (easily done!) Willie is upstairs whining and calling him back. This photo is the 2 of them posing for a close-up after some serious grooming of each other. Nice to see that they do indeed like each other! Davey and Willie did too, but never enough for the grooming bit.

Nous sommes Charlie

I removed the other photo today, 01/15/15, because I could not bear to look at it anymore. This photo at least shows there is hope.

Happy Birthday Evie!