The Two-Dollar Fish Fry

There are some lessons I have learned in life. Some are strange ones, such as the fact that the best way to deal with a flying squirrel in your house is to keep your composure, lock yourself in a room with the flying squirrel, and make sure you have a butterfly net to capture it with and a large container to put it in to remove it to the outdoors. 

Do you live in troubling times? Do you worry that your country is being run by evil, incompetent, lunatic dictator wanna-be's and their rich cronies?* Do you wake up with a feeling of doom nearly each and every day and shudder when you go onto the Internet, fearing what you may find there?

Maybe you can't save the world or delete the evil lunatics** from every current events story, but there IS something you can do. A far more OBVIOUS learning, acquired with much less difficulty than the lessons from the latest episode of the Great Flying Squirrel Caper, was this old truism: Eat something, you'll feel better. I share this posting in that regard.

It was Ash Wednesday, and all of the local places that do Friday fish fries for Lent as fundraisers were starting to make their presence known. There's one in Bellefonte, another one in Warriors Mark. I have not been to either of them, but the going rate is now $14 or $15 for a fish fry.

We love fish, and fortunately, my husband and I had been grocery shopping recently enough that we were able to pull together our own little fish fry at home, on the cheap. Above you may see my plate and what we had for lunch.

Here's what we've got: two Gorton's beer-battered fillets (check the frozen section of your local grocery), tartar sauce (chopped pickle and mayo; yes, like Meg, I'm also a Hellmann's girl) one of those fancy cheesy bacon gratin potatoes I like to make, and a side of asparagus (on sale for $1.77 a pound at Giant) with butter and parmesan cheese.

A while later, as we were talking about how good it was, and how easy it was, we started trying to figure out how much it cost, and as we analyzed it, we came up with about $2 for what's on this plate. 

It's about 50 cents a fillet (times 2), the potatoes are about 40 cents, and it's maybe 50 cents for asparagus. If you add in the orange juice and buttered bread that you don't see, it's probably about $2.50 for me, or $5 for the both of us to have what we agreed was a very nice lunch.

My only regret is that this plate is absolutely adorable, and it depicts a chef wearing a white chef hat, and a rooster wearing a white chef hat. I meant to show you the rooster, by leaving that part of the plate blank, but I forgot, and so here's the picture without the fun rooster chef showing, hardly at all; nothing but tail and feet. The rest: obscured by food!

My soundtrack song is Van Morrison, with Hungry for Your Love.

*Think that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government? Yeah, well, it's not looking too shabby from here in the good ol' U.S. of A.

**I've come back to say that I'd like to issue a correction on language here. My husband, who made his living for many years as a licensed psychologist, tells me that the appropriate term is malignant narcissistic sociopath. It's a rare and sometimes deadly dangerous combination of narcissism and sadism. You're welcome; hey, at least now you know what to call it. I don't know how to solve it, but maybe watching this will make you feel a bit better. It did me.