Tuesday musings.

Last Friday I facebooked that I was frying fish and my daughter called. She told me she'd be off at 7:00 and she hadn't had fried fish in forever, and I told her that by 7:00 the fish would be gone. Tough Luck. She moaned and I told her I'd fry fish for her the next time she's off, and that's tonight. So, in a couple of hours I'll be lighting up the fish cookers and sweating my butt to fry fish. Which I don't mind at all because she's my daughter and I love her.

Fish and french fries, fried corn-on-the-cob, hush puppies, cole slaw and iced tea. If they don't like that they can go eat somewhere else. The fish is marinating in mustard right now. I marinate my catfish in mustard before I bread it. A couple of tablespoons of regular old yellow prepared mustard will marinate four or five pounds of fish. It doesn't take much.

Of course, other folks heard that I was frying fish, so it's a party. I figure I'll feed 10 or 12 people tonight, but I don't have to get up tomorrow, so there's that and they won't stay late because they have to get up early in the morning. Tough Luck.

Tomorrow morning I'm plumbing, which I don't even like to spell. One of our commodes is trickling water so I'm going to put a new device inside the tank to stop the leaking. I bought two of the damned things because a commode at the church is trickling too. Once I get the home commode fixed, I'll gather up all the tools I used and run over to the church to fix that one. Did I mention that I hate plumbing? Well, I do.

My fish cooker was made in 1973 by a family friend, an old man who ran an auto-body shop. You've seen them everywhere, but when we made this one, you couldn't get them at the stores. Oh, no, if you wanted a fish coooker you had to scavenge a burner from an old hot water tank, then weld it into a suitable container. I used the bottom half of an old freon bottle and used a compination of 5/16 stock and rebar to make the grate.

Store-bought burner on the left, homemade burner on the right. I'd hesitate to estimate how many gallons of vegetable oil that old burner has heated to fry fish, but I'll add another one to the tally tonight.