Obama was born in the darkest depths of Mordor, that's why I'm voting Tea Party

Toaster oven catfish for the lazy and ill equipped bachelor.

So I found some cheap frozen Swai (mild catfish) fillets at the store a couple of weeks ago and have been experimenting with different ways to cook it in my extremely minimalist kitchen. I have a small and weak microwave, a toaster oven and a single induction hot plate for cooking so getting fancy isn't really on the menu so to speak.

I've found three ways to cook this stuff in my toaster oven so far and all of them came out at least reasonably tasty.

My first recipe was a desperation move with what I had in the pantry, crumbled some saltine crackers in a bowl, added salt, pepper and some grated five Italian cheese mix I had in the fridge, brushed the thawed fillet with butter and spread the cracker crumb mix on the fish and pressed it on with the back side of a tablespoon, flipped it over onto the pre-greased toaster oven grill I had pulled out and then did the other side the same way. Fifteen minutes in the pre-heated toaster oven at 375 degrees or so and I had a pretty decent main course to go with my salad.

The next time I was at the store I bought Italian bread crumbs and basically did the same thing with that, a little salt, Italian cheeses and a generous helping of pepper, same technique for applying and pressing the crumbs, same heat and cooking time, same pre-greased grill. This fish was bit more tasty than the first.

Then the other day I bought a canister of Tony Chachere's extra spicy Cajun seasoning. All I did this time is brush the fillet down with butter, a generous sprinkle of the Cajun seasoning on both sides, onto the pre-greased grill and into the toaster oven for fifteen minutes.. The fish came out quite hot but not mouth searingly so and was the best of the three ways I've tried.

I lived and worked in southern Louisiana for about five years in the 80's and learned to like the Cajun style of cooking, that's where I came across the Chachere's spice mix and I've been using it on and off ever since.

http://www.tonychachere.com/

Since July 4th I have dropped 15 lb and my resting heart rate has gone from 72 bpm to 56 bpm

I've been riding my bicycle all along for shopping and errands but on July 4th I decided to start training for fitness. To that end I have been riding an hour a day at an exertion level which for the most part does not force me to open my mouth to breathe. I have seen my average speed increase from about 11 mph to 15 mph and my weight and resting pulse rate have both dropped significantly.

I have two training loops within easy riding range of my home, one is around a large football/baseball/soccer complex parking lot that's deserted 90% of the time, this loop is fairly flat and pedaling is constant and I never have to drop below or go above the middle range of my 24 gears. The second loop I ride has a couple of hills that approach San Francisco levels of climbing and I'm using the entire 24 gears and really only pedaling for effect about 50% of the time since in the direction I ride the loop the climbs are considerably more severe than the drops and I'm in first gear all the way up. One hill on that two mile loop I can still only make it up without getting off and walking on the first lap, after that I have to get off about 3/4 of the way up and walk the rest of it.

The flat loop I'm doing an average of five days a week and the hilly one I'm doing about twice a week. I see white tail deer every time I ride the hilly loop, it's in a "horse subdivision" where a lot of the homes have significant pasture/patches of woods and quite a few have horses and there are deer all over it, that makes for an interesting and picturesque ride to help distract me from the pain of climbing those steep hills.

Exercise just for the sake of exercise has always bored the crap out of me but I find bike riding to be enjoyable and much easier to maintain a regimen with. I have an old Ab Lounger and a weight bench but finding the motivation to use them regularly is still hard, the freedom of jumping on the bike and just pedaling away looking at nature with the breeze in my face is like a siren call compared to huffing and puffing in one spot.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share my story to help motivate me a bit and possibly help someone else with the motivation to get out and start doing something that's a bit more fun for me at least than lots of other exercise options.

I had to give someone some really bad news today and it was not a pleasant task.

A single mother I know had her 1993 car overheat the other day after the water pump failed. Since I'm a decent shade tree mechanic I volunteered to help her out by putting a new water pump on it. I don't do this lightly because I have developed an allergy to that sort of greasy grime that makes the skin on my hands crack and bleed and this is a twenty year old car with three hundred thousand miles that has a lot of greasy grime build up.

However this was a family friend with a sixteen year old daughter and this poor old car was her only means of transportation so I started this morning as soon as it was daylight and before the humid heat of the day. When I tried to start the car to move it off the gravel and onto the slab where I was going to work on it the engine did not sound good and wouldn't start despite cranking it for a long time. So I got out the compression tester, a simple diagnostic tool for determining engine condition. The engine is toast, it would require a major rebuild to ever run again and the car simply isn't worth the effort, all it had to do was make it until tax time next year, another four months and our friend would have had enough to get another hooptie wagon.

Since my friend had let her cell phone go unpaid due to no money I had to call her at her work and tell her I couldn't fix the car, it nearly broke my heart and I could tell she was holding back tears.

Now there is a woman living in the suburbs with a sixteen year old, not even enough money for groceries and now no way to get to work unless her coworkers pick her up and drop her off each day, which they have been doing for the last few days while she tried to get her car fixed with no money. I had paid the fifty bucks for the water pump with my SS debit card but I just don't have the money to help her get another car, she and I are both at our wits end as to what to do.

There are three hundred plus million stories in America and this is one of them.

Bubble and Squeak

My dad was English and I grew up eating this for breakfast about once or twice a week when he would do the breakfast. I did a forum search and didn't find any references so I thought I'd share.

I was reminded of the dish by the recent cat rescue thread about two kittehs named Bubble and Squeak.

Dad would fry it in leftover bacon grease, these days that might be considered a bit over the top. Dad's explanation of the name was a bit different than the one on Wikipedia, he said that bubble and squeak was what your digestive tract did after you ate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_and_squeak

GOP: We built this

Tried communicating with someone that considers themselves a liberal Christian yesterday..

I don't normally do this but it seemed like a decent opportunity, she was going on about how we are so divided and if we would just unite together we wouldn't have nearly the problems that we do.

So I led her through the growing wealth disparity, the fact that the wealthy are paying less in taxes than they have in a very long time and that the extremely wealthy are trying to divide us on social issues in order to manipulate us into supporting things that are not good for the 99%, the entire enchilada, at which point she tells me "I know all that."..

Now this is someone who watches a lot of television so I said "You are exposed to a great deal of propaganda as well."

"But I don't watch the news." This woman thinks that because she doesn't watch the "news" news that she is not exposed to the divisive propaganda promulgated by the 1% (using shorthand here) for their own purposes..

And yet it was only a very few weeks ago she was marching (driving actually) off to buy a Chick-fil-A in order to "Support Christianity". I pointed this out to her and got a deer in the headlights look, it simply did not compute for her at all that what she was doing that day was divisive in any way.

One thing to be said for her is that she definitely isn't voting for Romney, but I don't think a Ron Paul vote is out of the question though.

I'm so tired of trying to point out the blatantly obvious to the willfully blind..

Turns out the frugal mystery fish I bought last week is a very mild catfish..

Saw these frozen filets called "Swai" at the grocery last week for for a lot less than catfish, bought a bag and stuck them in the freezer and kind of forgot about them until tonight.. Finally Googled the stuff and found out it's a species of catfish that for some reason is illegal to call "catfish" on the packaging in the USA..

http://www.livingalongsidewildlife.com/2010/08/fish-you-just-ate-may-be-more-of.html

Since my oven is a toaster oven I used teh Google once again and found this catfish recipe on toaster-oven.net, came out pretty good even though I substituted saltine crackers for Ritz and a mix of Romano, Provolone and Parmesan I already had a bag of in the fridge, also a bit of salt and a moderate sprinkle of pepper.

http://www.toaster-oven.net/Toaster-Oven-Recipes/catfish.htm

You will need the following ingredients to prepare Catfish for the Toaster Oven.

20 crushed round crackers, preferably Ritz
1/2 cup Parmesan or cheddar cheese, grated
1/3 cup minced parsley
4 Tablespoon of melted butter or margarine
4 catfish fillets

Turn on Toaster Oven to 400º Fahrenheit. Take the crackers, cheese, parsley, and mix together in a medium bowl. Take each fillet, brush the butter, or margarine on all sides. Now, take your fillets and roll them in your cracker mixture, covering each one completely. Now lay foil to cover the tray of the toaster oven and bake. It should take around 15 minutes or until the fish flakes easily when poked with a fork. This easy and fast meal can also be used at campsites. Just prepare the same, use foil except fold up over the fillets and set on top of the campfire.

The following PREVIEW has been approved for ALL AUDIENCES by obama for america

Using DD WRT on a Linksys WRT54G wifi router as a repeater/range extender.. Success at last.

I finally got my extra Linksys WRT54G router to function as a repeater/range extender after about ten tries, there was at least one person here on CH&S who wanted to know how it's done and I thought I'd share..

The instructions at this link work but there's a catch that I didn't figure out until I'd tried it a bunch of times.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater

The catch is, once you get the router configured and rebooted per the instructions above then evidently you can no longer access the router configuration through the wired ethernet link, this had me puzzled for a while and I did multiple hard 30-30-30 resets to put it back into bone stock DD WRT condition so I could access the configuration, the instructions don't really make this at all clear. I kept thinking I had borked the setup when I couldn't access the router via the wired ethernet.

Anyway, once I got the configuration the way I wanted it and the router rebooted I then unplugged it for a few minutes. After plugging in it took about two minutes for the router to reboot, acquire the signal I wanted to repeat and then allow the two clients I wanted to connect to access the network. It requires a bit of patience to get this to work and patience is not always my strongest attribute.