Catfish filet patted dry, dredged in whole wheat flour, drenched in whey, dredged in Panko (Japanese breadcrumbs). Hastened with a steam of water and lime which was reserve liquid from pulling ceviche out from a jar. It was a chubby little filet and I didn't have all day to stand around waiting for eight minutes while the bulging center cooked.
I learned it's possible to buy raw milk in Colorado. You have to buy a share in a cow. Ha ha ha ha ha. It's quite expensive. You buy a share, then you pay monthly lease for upkeep on the cow, and then you pay a premium for the milk. Then you have to go out to the farm once a week and get it. The farm can be up to 40 miles outside of town. This goes for goats too. The benefit is unpasteurized, non-homogenized whole milk that is chiefly grass fed but supplemented with good stuff not commercially over-productive stuff, and not supplemented with soy and with no steroids and no antibiotics If the cow or goat needs medication, their milk is not circulated. The thing about owning a share in a cow is if you want more than your share specifies, your share entitles you to whatever surplus is available, which is great for people interested in producing cheese. I just read a book with 47 pages on the subject, Real Food What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck, a wearisome little tome that drones, is repetitively pontificating, and I don't recommend it, but the point is, for a person interested in trying their hand at making cheese, this is all terribly important. But I can tell you from what I've learned so far, it would be much easier to just stick with pasteurized milk, and that makes me sad. So, if you live in California, Connecticut, or New Mexico where you can buy it in certain stores, please send me 25 gallons for experimental purposes. I'll pay you back.
You know what homogenization means. Do you know how it's done? Processors force milk through super-fine meshes by high pressure breaking apart the fat particles into droplets so tiny that each minute particle is completely surrounded by other milk solids and cannot reform into larger blobs as fat tends to do -- a stable colloid, you see. This has the advantage to the processor of redistributing the unsightly cells that were killed by pasteurization throughout the milk that would ordinarily settle to the bottom. The cream no longer floats to the top. It makes things better for transportation across long distances. With non-homogenized milk, it's possible to skim off the cream from the top and whip it into butter. It's much more difficult to whip homogenized cream, the little bitty particles don't cooperate as easily, and it doesn't taste as good either. Oddly, homogenization has the disadvantage of slightly reducing the good-by period that was extended by pasteurization.
Today was fun. I walked over to the capitol to photograph a scheduled protest but it was extremely windy with high gusts, a terrible day to hold up signs, which is OK, they weren't all that imaginative anyway. Flags would have been better. Starting out crossing Broadway I thought the whole thing might have been a mistake. Leaning hard into the wind I wasn't making much progress, looking a bit like Marcel Marceau in his "closing the window" skit where he depicts the wind blowing him backward into a moonwalk. Then the gust abruptly stopped and I lunged forward. I could barely keep on my feet.
I struck up a conversation with a bag lady, a real bag lady with an actual bag, and she said something so incredibly shocking and rude and outrageous that I suspected a Moby. (A plant pretending to be something they're not in order to bring disrepute to a site owner.) She was speaking English in an halted Eastern European accent using all the wrong prepositions. This caused me to strike up a conversation with the very next gorgeous little sylph-like waif to wander into my conversational grasp. I'm kidding. I didn't need a reason to talk to the girl, I was doing that anyway.
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