Mike Nolan
Thu. Feb 26th, 2026
I've seen suggestions for a half-and-half pie with a strip of dough down the middle as a divider, but I've never tried it.
I'm not very experienced at grilling, either, I can do a steak but it is easier for me to pan fry it and finish it in the oven. I do burgers on the grill, and I like to do chicken or turkey using the rotisserie.
Our grill is about 24 years old and one of the gas controls no longer works, we'll have to replace it at some point (nobody does repairs on grills anymore), I think I used it less than a dozen times all summer last year, mostly for burgers, somehow it doesn't seem worthwhile to spend $1000+ on a fancy new grill, and the smaller ones generally don't have rotisseries these days.
Swai would probably be a good fish done en papillote (in a parchment bag), I've usually cooked whitefish with lemon, but I've also used white wine or rice wine vinegar and even Worcestershire, and it is good done on a bed of cooked mirepoix (finely chopped onions, celery and carrots,or you can leave the onions out, it'd also be good with some red bell pepper.)
The frozen orange roughy we can get are OK, the fresh ones are better but a lot more expensive. I like red snapper, but Diane doesn't. I seldom buy cod and won't buy tilapia any more.
I grew up within a few miles of the Mississippi, catfish was pretty common, but also bluegill. My mother loved smelt, probably because there wasn't much to preparing it.
I'm not surprised your husband thought the swai tasted like catfish, it used to be sold as 'Asian catfish' before the US Government prohibited that.
When I've grown parsley, it didn't seem to yield much. Basil does.
We've got five 4th of July tomatoes in and they're looking pretty good, but the ones I have the biggest hopes for are the First Lady. This is an offshoot of Early Girl, as I recall, it produces tomatoes that are a bit bigger than a tennis ball and good eating. It can be a prolific producer, one year we put in 3 plants and in early September we were picking anywhere from 40 to 80 tomatoes EVERY DAY. My wife was selling them at her Labor Day garage sale at like 4 for $1.
When we do fish, my wife has orange roughy and I have salmon. (She doesn't like salmon.) You cook it like any white fish, and it has a very mild flavor.
I cook hers in a pan with butter and lemon juice, better to have too much lemon juice than too little. It makes a great sauce for the fish. We often have fish with broccoli, which she also likes with lemon juice.
The odds are good you've had swai because it is often used for things like fish sticks. You can cook it like you would cod. It is a fairly neutral tasting fish and not very oily, so it works well breaded and fried.
I made an 11-strand Challah and 5 buns (about 60 grams baked weight) with the dough I made last night. Refrigerating scaled and pre-shaped logs of dough overnight works well for rolling out the strands, but next time I'll use a bit more flour so the dough is a little stiffer and not quite as tacky.
We had sloppy joes on Challah buns. I started with the Food Network sloppy joe recipe but with numerous changes. I made careful notes, this is a recipe I'll make again.
Mike Nolan.
I was waiting for the surprise ending, like your neighbor is allergic to chocolate!
I started a batch of Challah tonight, I plan to follow a suggestion in the BBGA forums and divide the dough and shape it into rough logs tonight, refrigerate them, and roll them out for braiding tomorrow.
I started a new Aerogarden today, 6 bush cherry tomato plants and 6 spinach. The spinach should be fairly fast growing and doesn't have a long harvest window, so by the time the tomatoes are starting to crowd them out of the light, the spinach should be running out of steam. We're still thinking we may try strawberries in the other garden and possibly start some lettuce some time this fall.
My wife got two eggplants that will go in the garden tomorrow and we found a fairly big rosemary at Costco to replace the one we tried to winter indoors. (We've seldom had one last all winter, usually we forget about it and it runs out of water at some point.)
I had a hot dog with some cheese and sauerkraut for supper, Diane had hot dogs in kraut (no bun).
We had macaroni and cheese tonight, my wife's stomach is still a bit touchy.
We had Little Caesars thin crust mushroom pizza the other day, I thought it was pretty good, and Diane did initially, too, but she had some problems overnight that were similar to her garlic allergy symptoms, so I'm wondering if there's garlic in the crust or sauce that we didn't notice at first. (We even went with 'light sauce'.)
The Little Caesars website doesn't list ingredients and garlic isn't generally listed among the allergens, I dropped them a note to ask if there's garlic hidden somewhere.
We had a beef stir fry with red bell pepper and mushrooms.
