no fish for the weary

Triumph! After two consecutive years of making failed New Year's resolutions to increase my consumption of healthy fish to four times a week, I may have finally experienced a breakthrough.

By Thursday of most weeks, I can be found holding steady at a cumulative fish unit deficit of (-4), made all the more deleterious by the fact that I'm usually also running cumulative alcohol and salt unit surpluses of (+4) and (+4 to an order of 10) respectively.

But today I am in the piscine red no more! I am actually on pace to break my pro rata fish ingestion quota.

In fact I've got a fantastic portion of mahi mahi in the sink defrosting right now. They say (and by "they" I obviously mean my mom and other dubiously accredited experts on food safety) that thawing frozen food at room temperature rather than in the fridge allows bacteria to grow at an unsafe pace.

But warnings be damned.  One of my mahis is glued to another mahi right now and the whole thing is a big giant impenetrable block of ice. I imagine that must be how the town commissaries of the less affluent former Soviet republics dispensed each family's bimonthly ration of milk in the long harsh wintertime.

I'd rather like my fish block to defrost, as a character on 24 might say urgently, "within the hour!" Reading about all those earthquakes in Baja California the last couple days has left me with fish tacos on the brain, and I'm going to make some tonight.

The last time I had real great fish tacos was a couple years back in a little city called San Felipe in BC, where a group of us gringos drove down the peninsula and dragged out a tarp across the beach to camp out overnight and watch the sun rise.

After a couple of ridiculously inexpensive and fresh fish tacos and a good deal more of cervezas, one of our number yakked in the sand without ever leaving his sleeping bag (actual picture below.  Not sure why I didn't think to help ease his discomfort rather than capture the moment for posterity on camera). 

So we all had to pick up the tarp and re-set up camp a good few hundred feet on down the beach.

Ultimate party foul?  Hrmmm.  Seeing as how earlier that afternoon I had tripped and spilled my bucket of re-purposed Coronas, as well as walked right through an actual screen door at the cantina, my own glass house is a little underinsured to start a stone-throwing contest.

Anyway, back to my fish:  as much as I'd like to go to Mexico right now and have some of those magic tacos, I think I'm going to insist on higher standards of food sanitation.  After all, I have no desire to reprise my gastrointestinal nightmare from last year when I got back from Peru with some super bug even two rounds of Cipro couldn't kill.*  Even if this time I don't find myself inconveniently between health insurance plans.

*I think I got sick from accidentally swallowing tap water while brushing my teeth.  Or, you know, maybe from eating a) alpaca steaks and b) guinea pig (left).  Probably that water.  Right.

On that note, I'm going to go check on my fish cube and get started on some guac and other taco essentials. 

By the way, you wouldn't guess it because a disturbingly high percentage of my meals consist of reconsituted a) fake soup (ramen) and b) fake juice (Crystal Light), but I'm actually a pretty fair chef.

My greatest ambition is that when I die and they discover (and by "they" I mean my mom and other rogue scientists) that my internal organs are actually pickled from ramen and Crystal Light, they can look at each other and sigh, "well at least she could cook better than that Rachael Ray skank."