I really like them. Hopefully in the future I will be able to put in a bigger pond and I can try again with the Golden Orfes and do it right by getting about 5 or 6. For now I am going to pass on them as I see the advice the guy in the pond store told me that one was good, was wrong. Meantime I rewarded myself by going back to the pond store and buying two new fish. I got a stunner of a butterfly koi in a strange metalic almost mustard old gold color. I know that might not sound attractive but the fish is lovely. Also a most beautiful deep almost red "goldfish" with the most long, long, long tail and fins.

We started a fantastic tradition a few years back... My hubby makes the entire dinner for the four of us on Christmas Day!! We have a standing rib roast/prime rib with Au Jus Juice, mashed potatoes, steamed asparagus, tossed salad, corn, warm flaky crescent rolls, oh and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. Later in the evening...a slice of cheescake with strawberries and a fresh cup of coffee to top it off. Ahhh.... Perfection!! (and did I mention he & little elves clean up the kitchen also? Kinda like his gift to me that day...no complaining here! :) ) There are some traditions that I will NEVER change!!! :) ~Mary Jane

Fairway had nice squid last weekend. My NewEngland scallops are from another market. I wanted frozen seafood so i can use it throughout the week. Fairway has a nice white balsamic, very thick almost like honey. We had the cod salad for lunch yesterday over baby arugula and the Kumatoes with just a thin stream of the balsamic. I've salted cod many ways. A quick salting using fresh cod is kosher salt, a 1/4 cup for 2-3 hours in glass in the fridge. It will draw a bit of water and make a slurry rather quickly. Rinse and soak in milk or yogurt milk, (non-fat plain yogurt mixed with water), over night. Most of my cod this season was in salt for 3-4 days in a slurry created by the salt and water it extracted. I then rinsed and soaked in water 24 hours, portioned and frozen. -Soaking in milk again before using. Not a full 'salt' cod that has been air dried. Does not have the 'fishy' deep flavor of a dry salt that i love but the quality does make a difference in a true dry salt fish. Lots of rinsing and a final bath of milk/yogurt helps. A thick fillet from a large watery fish like cod does benefit from a dry salt brine if only an hour. A good chef or fish-n-chip joint will do just that to extract some surface water before cooking. Similar reasoning to dry brining meats. Though much less time is needed. I'm making the shrimp/salmon this morning. Adding a few scallops. It will be ready this afternoon with just a few hours in marinade, best left overnight, but need to keep the fork out as it is really for tomorrow...a bit seafood overkill having Bouillabaisse tonight.

Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!