Tasty Tuesdays: Crispy Cornmeal Flounder with Coconut Salad

Posted on January 31, 2012 by seriffim

This post brought to you by alliteration and the letter C.

At Vassar, Tuesdays were glorious because Tuesdays were Tasty Tuesdays, where local restaurants would set up a booth in the college center and instead of going to the dining hall you could have empanadas and lavender lemonade, or falafel and bubble tea for lunch. It was fantastic.

Anyway, today I bring you a recipe I came up with last week. It kind of reminds me of something I’d make/find in Mexico, probably since all of the coconut salad ingredients are native to that country, imagine that.

It’s another fish recipe, can you tell I like fish? You don’t have to use flounder; probably tilapia or any similar white fish would be fine. As usual I did exactly zero measuring when I made this, so all measurements are approximate. Use your best judgment and your taste buds. This recipe will feed two ravenous twenty-somethings.

Ingredients:

2 flounder filets
2/3 cup cornmeal
1/3 cup flour
1 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. chili powder
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. onion powder
½ tsp. paprika

1 cup flaked coconut
1 avocado
1 lime
1 jalapeño, seeded and minced
¼ cup red onion, minced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbsp. vegetable oil

Preparation:

In a shallow dish (such as a casserole dish, or something) combine cornmeal through paprika and thoroughly mix.

Preheat oven broiler.

Spread coconut on a cookie sheet and place on top oven rack for a few minutes, checking often. Remove when just golden brown and toasty.

Mince onion, garlic, and jalapeño, and place in a bowl. Mix well. Cut avocado into chunks and add to bowl. Squeeze lime into bowl, add coconut and mix well. Set aside.

Heat large skillet over medium heat and add vegetable oil. Dredge flounder in cornmeal mixture on both sides, making sure it’s well covered. Add flounder to skillet, flip when edged are just starting to go white and are no longer translucent. The cornmeal mixture should be crispy and fish should flake easily.

Serve with quinoa or whatever makes you happy, top flounder with coconut salad mixture, enjoy!

Hello There!

Posted on January 24, 2012 by seriffim

If you’re here from APW, let me just say ‘Hello! It’s nice to see you here!’ If you’re here because this is what you do on Tuesday mornings, rock on, rock on. So, APWers, a little about me–my name is Stacey, (but you already knew that), I like to write (you knew that too), I thrive on creativity and I’m in an awesome CIRCUS. Really. You should check it out. If you want to know more about me specifically, and my little dog too, check out the About page. Otherwise, may I suggest the following:

If you want to check out an in-progress block print of a kraken, go here.

If you’re into schaudenfreude, I suggest this.

If you want to see a sick before and after of my bathroom remodel (including a vanity I designed and built from scratch) check this out.

If you’re into poached eggs (delicious!) saunter over on this way.

If you’re a regular here, and have ZERO idea what’s going on, an article I wrote was published this morning on a super awesome website called A Practical Wedding. You can find my words of wisdom here!

Peace!

Lights, Electrical, Action!

Posted on January 23, 2012 by seriffim

Before we get into the normal hi-jinx, a bit of housekeeping!

First off, notice anything different? Of course you do! I finally got around to re-designing some stuff, like that spiffy new background. I spent some quality, much needed fun time with the P-shop this weekend (I made my first stock image, wooo), and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

On the homepage, you’ll notice three paint splotches with icons in them. They’re clickable (please click them). One is for my RSS feed, which is for lazy people; the second is for my Pinterest, which I have finally started using despite having had an account for months—if you’re not familiar with Pinterest, I suggest you check it out, it’s pretty rad; the third is for my twitter. Sweet.

I mentioned last week that I’d made some unexpected headway on one of the industrial projects I had knocking around in my skullspace. As I’ve said before, one of the big cons of our loft is that it’s very dark and the only lighting we have is track lighting. Apparently they weren’t big on electrical in 1907, or, in 1987 when they turned the mill into living space. Maybe the target audience was young professional lemurs? I don’t know. Anyway, all of the lighting in the main space of the house is track lighting (really hard to bury conduit in 10×6” beams) and none of that track lighting is in our cavernous living room. So I came up with this plan:

I was going to get a warehouse style shade from the internet, and hardwire the rest myself. Because I’m awesome, and actually wiring a lamp is incredibly simple. A baby could do it, but you should probably stop them. But then, I went to the not so nearby city to pick up a friend from the train and we went to Ikea to pretend we were Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt look at all the weird stuff. Ikea did not disappoint. They had tiny circus tents, and moose cookie cutters (I bought one of these things). They also had these, which are my first ever Ikea purchase:

In case you can’t tell from the name, ‘these’ are pendant lights, and actually cost less than the shades I was planning on buying.

When he got home from his business trip and looked at my lighting plans, Nick informed me that it’s super illegal to hang things off sprinkler pipes and we should probably put them somewhere else. We decided to suspend them on aircraft cable, above the bookshelf. Great! They won’t be at all in the way of aerials and they’ll look really nice there. Except, problem: there’s no plug near there for miles.

Nick had a great idea though, of wiring in an outlet on the conduit that leads to the fan (I know, this is totally fascinating). So we did. It involved a lot of fishing wire, and it turns out, fishing wire is actually…super boring. Fishing wire looks like this:

I wired plugs on the end of both lights, as they were originally meant to be hardwired into a ceiling, we installed the outlet on the ceiling and wired it to a switch. I got to use the impact driver Nick got me for Christmas for the first time…

And it was Awesome. Almost as awesome as my multiple chins in this photo:

We mounted conduit clamps to the beams and attached the aircraft cable. Then we put up the pulleys (yes, there are pulleys involved), and put up the lights.

They look like this:

And here is the difference they make in our lives:

It was all very clever. Other than that, the weekend was…interesting. Nick and his dad destroyed some of my drywall job and installed wiring for a washer dryer, and Nick was the only one in this family who made it through Sunday without throwing up. Rad.

PS: Awesome things are happening tomorrow.

2012: Embracing Industrial

Posted on January 16, 2012 by seriffim

I don’t really make resolutions for new years (I set goals and I accomplish them, mothaf***as!), but if I were making a resolution for the DIY sector of my life, it would probably be ‘embrace industrial’.

When we first moved into the loft a little less than a year ago it was a little bit confused about what it was, and therefore, so was I. You see, it’s a century old woolen mill. It has massive factory windows, and enough exposed brick to make a New Yorker sick with envy. It has more visible pipes than I can count—and they’re all…beige?

And then there’s the kitchen, which was strangely cozy; whoever had decorated it seemed to be going for a country cabin vibe, which would be fine if this were a cabin and not an industrial loft.

So, between the bizarre kitchen, and the beige pipes, and the adorable red stairs,

it became apparent that the previous owners were definitely going for a ‘cozy’ theme. Clearly they never spent the winter here. Cozy isn’t really what I thought of when I woke up this morning and cursed the fact that all the heat escapes through the glorious bank of skylights and factory windows.

I tried to roll with the cozy for a while actually. I told Nick ‘no I will not paint all the exposed pipes black’, mostly because I have many, better things to do with my time, but also I didn’t want to make the loft feel ‘cold’. I even tried to embrace the cozy for a while during the bathroom remodel, aiming for a mix of industrial and old west Victorian. Eventually I jumped ship and went all the way over to the ‘sleek modern’ end of the spectrum.

I finished the bathroom right before the holidays, and last week as I contemplated what was on the project docket for 2012, I realized something. I have thrown cozy out the enormous factory windows and into the river below, which, by the way, has started to freeze over. Adios, cozy.

So, let’s take a look at the glorious, modern, pipe-made things I have planned for the coming year:

Bathroom Shelves:

Made out of plumbing pipe, obviously. These are pretty straightforward much more miniature versions of our bookshelves, except these will have a toilet paper holder attached—badass. We lost some space with the remodel by getting rid of that weird tiny half shelf, so these will replace it and then some. And then I can stop storing the bath towels with my t-shirts.

Replacing the Futon:

With one made out of plumbing pipe. Sensing a pattern yet? It will have industrial casters, and also lots of wooden slats so your bum doesn’t fall through. I think it will definitely be awesome. Another thing that often bothers me about this place is all the spots where there could be awesome, natural looking wood, and instead it got painted white. Sigh.

Lighting the Living Room:

This one actually doesn’t involve making anything out of plumbing pipe, just using the pre-existing pipe, and pulleys. I frigging love pulleys. I actually made a lot of unexpected headway on this one the other day, so keep an eye out for it!

Oh, and then there’s the Kitchen, which doesn’t involve any pipe, but does involve pouring concrete countertops, but that’s a whole different pony. I mean post.

Ciao!

Bathroom Reveal

Posted on January 9, 2012 by seriffim

Without further ado, here we are! Unfortunately our bathroom hasn’t actually gained any square footage (though it feels like it has!) so taking a decent picture of the bathroom is still impossible.

Just in case you forgot, here’s the before:

Much was learned in the renovating process (like woodworking, and how to tile), so this project is definitely proof that you don’t need to know XYZ skill in order to do XYZ, if that makes sense. Wanting a better bathroom is the perfect excuse for learning how to make a better bathroom, in other words.

The only thing that’s left to be done is to put in some pipe shelves above the toilet, but I’ve already drawn up the plans, so that should be a pretty simple weekend project, for whenever I have a free weekend. (Which could be…never.)

It’s frankly pretty weird to not have a project that I need to work on RIGHT NOW, but this break is also much needed, and it lets me do something I haven’t gotten to do for a while–brainstorm fun projects. We do need to finish sound proofing pretty soon, just to get that one done and to put our big mirrors on the wall before someone runs into them. Other than that though I’d like to work on storage solutions for all the loose milk crates and circus equipment floating around downstairs; I have a pretty sick idea for a futon replacement, which you may see soon; and I think it’s about time to start brainstorming about the kitchen, since we’ve been stalling on that one for a while. There are definitely some walls there that need to come down. Should be an interesting 2012, see you there!