Recipe Testing and Halibut-Habit

Earlier this week, I sent out my first round of recipes for testing. My lovely and willing testers include

· my sister Maria and her husband John;
· my parents;
· my father-in-law (my sweet mother-in-law will taste but not test);
· my sister-in-law Kara and nine-year-old, already-cooking-up-a-storm nephew Drew;
· my friend Susanna, a Chattanooga mental health professional;
· my grad-school-buddy, potter, and work-at-home-daddy Joel in Traveler’s Rest, SC;
· my childhood best friend Erin in Warrenburg, Missouri;
· and, lastly, my wonderful employee and friend Warren!

To my great delight, I have two soon-to-be testers as well: my new friend Mary Margaret, a lawyer in Atlanta, and Birmingham-Matt who hiked the AT with Chris last week. With nearly 100 recipes and, I’ve decided, at least two tests per, we have a lot of cookin’ cut out for us! Terrible work, huh?

In another vein, I started constructing a halibut recipe this week. Halibut has been off our menu list for quite some time as Chris spent his nineteenth summer in Alaska working in a fish cannery. Having arrived in an old VW bus, long-haired, and eager—his mom terribly anxious back in Alabama—Chris found himself broke and hungry. At the cannery, he asked the foreman for help until payday. The foreman’s offer? A thirty-five-pound slab of fresh-from-the-Pacific halibut! Needless to say, in spite of the fact that he shared the huge portion with all his cannery buddies (they, in return, fed him until pay day), he tired of halibut for, oh, a brief ten years—though I’m sure the three months of gutting didn’t wet his appetite either. Now, at thirty-three, he’s ready to establish a good halibut-habit again.

Endgame: I purchased a new Kenmore Elite gas range (5th high-BTU burner; convection; warming drawer) with my grant money last Saturday. It will arrive this coming week with its accurate oven (imagine!) and won’t-flicker-out burners. Even better, the total cost of the unit was $450 less than I was originally quoted, so I was able to purchase a fancy new-to-me Nikon D-50 camera as well. Look for a plethora of pictures soon as I attempt to understand my fancy new digital contraption!