2sparrows

Greek Baked Fish #76684
recipe by evelyn/athens

This fish dish has bold, Mediterranean flavours. It is also gorgeous to look at. Accompany with a good white wine and lots of crusty bread, cause the sauce is unbelievable.

4-5 servings
1 hour 20 minutes 40 mins prep

2 lbs fresh black grouper fillet, cut into approximately 1
1/2 inch pieces (or other fillet of your choice)
2 (16 ounce) cans crushed tomatoes, juices drained
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
1 cup kalamata olives, pitted and halved
1/2 cup fresh parsley, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons small capers, drained
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 cup white wine
1/2-3/4 cup olive oil

Preheat oven to 375F.

Place the fish pieces in a metal baking pan.

Season lightly with salt.

Combine all the remaining ingredients, except the wine and olive oil, season, and distribute on top of fish.

Pour the wine and olive oil over and bake for about 35-40 minutes, or until the fish flakes.

Notes:
[From CR]
This is what I cooked for Greek night and it was very tasty. I would cut the onions smaller than they asked and I
used cut up tomato instead of crushed. It was yummy good.

[From Sean: I think she also cut the oil a lot!]

Here’s the salad Kelly made, taken from the Moosewood cookbook “Moosewood Cooks at Home.”

We thought this was really good and will make it again.

Ingrediants:

• 1/2 pound pasta shells
  (we used some curly shells, but anything will do)

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 medium eggplant, cut into 1 inch cubes (we skipped the eggplant!)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
• juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1 green or red bell pepper, diced

• 5 artichoke hearts, drained and quartered (14 oz can)
• 1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and diced
• 2 tomatoes, diced
• 1 celerey stalk, sliced
• 2 scallions, chopped
• 2 tablespoons chopped fressh dill (2 teaspoons dried) - I think we cut this in 1/2 as it seemed like a lot
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano (1 teaspoon dried)
• salt and ground black pepper to taste

• 1 cup grated or crumbled feta cheese
• greek olives

Bring a large covered pot of water to a rapid boil. Cook the psata shells, uncovered, until al dente, and then drain. Rinse them under cold water until cool, and drain again.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the eggplant. Cover and cook for 3 minutes on medium heat. Stir in the salt, garlic, lemon juice, and water. Cover and simmer for 6 to 8 minutes, until the egg-plant is almost tender. Add the diced red bell peppers, and if you are using dried herbs, add the dill and oregano. Simmer a few minutes more, until peppers are cooked but still have some crunch.

While the eggplant and peppers are cooking, place the artichoke hearts, cucumbers, tomatoes, celerey, scallions, fresh dill, and fresh oregano in a large salad bowl. Add the cooked eggplan and peppers. Stir in the pasta and toss well. Add salt and pepper and mroe lemon juice or olive oil to taste.

Note: This salad can be refridgerated to serve later, but the pasta may absorb the flavors and need an additional dash of lemon jioce and olive oil just before serving.

Here’s one of the dishes Kelly and I made. We modified the cucumber sauce by using this recipe and the one from our Greek Night in our Florida cooking club a few years ago. I found this on the web at allrecipes.com.

This was really good and we will definitely make it again.

INGREDIENTS:

* 1 (15 ounce) can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained
* 1 onion, chopped
* 1/2 cup fresh parsley
* 2 cloves garlic, chopped
* 1 egg
* 2 teaspoons ground cumin
* 1 teaspoon ground coriander
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 dash pepper
* 1 pinch cayenne pepper
* 1 teaspoon lemon juice
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 1 cup dry bread crumbs
* oil for frying
*
* 1 (6 ounce) container plain yogurt
* 1/2 cucumber - peeled, seeded, and finely chopped
* 1 teaspoon dried dill weed
* salt and pepper to taste
* 1 tablespoon mayonnaise

DIRECTIONS:

1. In a large bowl mash chickpeas until thick and pasty; don’t use a blender, as the consistency will be too thin. In a blender, process onion, parsley and garlic until smooth. Stir into mashed chickpeas.
2. In a small bowl combine egg, cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, cayenne, lemon juice and baking powder. Stir into chickpea mixture along with olive oil. Slowly add bread crumbs until mixture is not sticky but will hold together; add more or less bread crumbs, as needed. Form 8 balls and then flatten into patties.
3. Heat 1 inch of oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Fry patties in hot oil until brown on both sides.
4. In a small bowl combine yogurt, cucumber, dill, salt, pepper and mayonnaise. Chill for at least 30 minutes.

Our cooking club met for Greek Night, and we all shared some wonderful food a good conversation. M. showed off his memory skills by reciting, from memory, the 1st Chapter from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. He does such a fantastic job with these “readings.”

I’ll be putting in the recipes on-line as they come in.

So I went to review the scans with the Dr. today. Apparently when he called me earlier this week, he was reading the radiologist’s report, which says:

“Findings consistent with horizontal tear posterior horn medial meniscus.”

But my Dr. showed me the scans and he doesn’t think there’s a tear at all. There is certainly something going on there, but perhaps just degeneration.

He also showed me some other areas of interest on the scans, and the effusion (bone contusion) of the condyle femur, which was strongly evident 18 months ago in my 1st scans, are really not visible. That’s consistent in the fact that I no longer feel pain laterally along the bone. Also, there is a “gap” between the patella and the femur, where he did some clean up, that is visible. There’s really nothing in the area of the patella tendon where it attaches to the patella, which is where I was really sore for 4-6 weeks. Perhaps the iontopherosis did something after all?

He wants to wait 2-3 months before we make a decision on a 2nd surgery. I tend to agree as I have been improving a lot. Right now the only thing that bothers me is impact, such as running or hiking down steep hills. Biking and elliptical are fine. So I think I’ll wait, and just take it slow on getting back to running.

I think things may be getting out of control. I have way too many devices and too many wires for my home network. At least I recently bought a shelf and moved it all out of a small cabinet, where it was getting too hot and way to cramped to work. Any time I needed to add a new cable for a new device, it was a nightmare trying to figure it all out. So I moved it all out and used velcro bands and twisties to keep the cables as short as possible. It’s still somewhat of a mess wire wise, and it would be good to get several 1′ and 2′ etherent cables.

Here’s a quick picture I took with my new logitech quickcam fusioin that I use for web conferencing/video chat:

And descriptions for each device:

• Far Left on the floor: Belkin UPS with AVR
• Top, hanging on wall: Another UPS, this one APC, with a USB into the PC for graceful shutdown.

Top shelf starting on left:

• 160 GB USB 2.0 / Firewire external driveShared backup storage for various computers around the house. I built this by buying a cheap case and a simple IDE drive.
• NetGear Wirless access point Used to get wireless signal to the rest of the house.
• IOGear KVMP I use this to share one keyboard and mouse between the two main computers, my shuttle (see below) and my work thinkpad (not shown, it’s on the desk). I run the video direct from each computer to two monitors, so I’m not sharing the video. I do sometimes add a 3rd PC for short term work, in which cases I will share video on one of the monitors. This device also lets me share 2 USB peripherals.
• Shuttle PC I built this a while back, runs mostly windows though does have debian on a partition. Had some problems buidling it, with voltage regulaters being replaced by shuttle once, and then having the motherboard completely replaced to fix some weird problems. Runs great now though the firewire ports seem to have a short. :-/

Bottom shelf starting on left:

• NetGear 8 port Fast Ethernet switchSo that all my ethernet devices can talk to each other and get to the Net.
• LinkSys Vonage RouterThis gives me a VoIP phone from Vonage, which works great. I do all my long distance and work calls from this phone now, for a low monthly flat fee. It has a WAN port that goes the DSL router and then an Ethernet port runs to the switch.
• Sprint (Zyxel) DSL routerTo get to the Internet. It’s a bummer, but when I put this into briding mode instead of routing mode, so that my vonage router got the WAN IP, I lost the ability to run mrtg from my Internet server to my home network to monitor bandwidth usage, as the vonage box doesn’t support that. At some point I would like to solve that problem.

At least there’s a little more space. I’d like to add another shuttle type (small form factor) PC to run linux on, and I recently ordered a LinkSys NSLU2, which I will run linux on instead of the standard linksys firmware. Once you put linux on these, affectionaly known as slugs, the skies the limit. I plan to run an itunes music server, and ftp server, ssh, etc. I won’t move my things that need more stability that DSL here, such as my web server, mail server, etc. And then I’ll need at least one more, if not two, USB 2.0 hard drives to connect to the slug. So at that point I pretty much will be out of space.

What needs to happen is all these home devices need to be standardized to fit in a small home sized rack.

I received the black ih5 for Christmas from my mom. We were looking to replace an aging and partial broken Nakamichi alarm clock/radio/cd player. There were two main reasons we wanted to replace that — the motor that lifted the CD cover was broken so you had to hold the back left arm as it raised and lowered, and the number of cables was ridiculous! There was a sub woofer, and a left and right speaker, with all the controls and CD unit built into one of those. But there were literally 10-15 cables to connect those 3 units, so all it did was collect cat hair and dust behind the bed.

So the ih5 is a nice replacement for that reason because there is just one cable for power. We hadn’t really used the CD player on the old unit that much recently, but now having the ipod there, it’s great to just turn on music in the room for a few minutes. You can also wake to the ipod, but so far the few times I’ve needed to use the alarm I’ve just used the buzzer.

The good:

• ipod in the bedroom for lost of music
• sound is relatively good for such a small unit
• just one wire!
• controls are all relatively intuitive

The bad:

• The unit casts incredible light. It does have 3 settings, the highest of which is like a small black and white tv. Even the lowest setting is fairly bright so we have to cover it at night.
• To control everything except on/off and volume of the ipod, you have to use the ipod controls. This unit would have been amazing if it would let you control everything via the alarm clock rather than the ipod. Maybe the next generation will have that.
• The remote control is option and costs an additional $19.95.

Overall I’m happy with the unit and would recommend it to anyone with an ipod that wants music in their bedroom.

Dr. J just called after reading the radiolgist’s report from the MRI I had on Friday. The report says torn medial posterior meniscus! Dr. Jones has not read the scans himself yet — he’ll do that on Thursday when I see him. But I knew something was wrong, after the strong recovery that turned sour in mid to late October about 6 weeks after surgery!

Until he sees the scans he can’t say what we should do, but the options are to go in and trim out the tear (can’t really repair the meniscus) or just wait and see if the pain goes away. It seemed much better last week, as I actually mountain biked 5 times and had one 35 minute hike at a good pace. But that, of course, is no where near where I want to be.

Stay tuned!

Wow! Brilliant!! C.S. Lewis comes across as a genius in this book, in my opinion. It is probably the most I’ve dog-eared a book since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This is a series of letters from Screwtape, an “administrative demon,” that is directing his nephew, Wormwood, a novice demon, in the corruption of one man’s soul. It’s a very clever strategy to see things from the Devil’s perspective, as he refers to God throughout the book as Our Enemy. It really casts an ironic light on many human activities in modern day living.

I did have a ton of dog-eared sections for me to go back and read again, so I’ll only include some of them here:

• in discussing humans…
  

  As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

• in discussing sin…
  

  Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

• On Pleasure…
  

  …you allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed it, and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his … friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there, a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive pleasures…

  He goes on to discuss this further in detail, but the main point is that when a human does something that he truly enjoys, not to impress friends or to “palm off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium,” it allows the human to be closer to his true self. But if things are done with the illusion of pleasure, but are really done for other reasons, you “detach him from the Enemy [God] … by deteching him from himself.”

  One other note on this point… I kept a reading notebook for years before I started posting some of my thoughts online. And once I started posting online, it was never to impress anyone. It was always mainly for me personally to go back and recall what I had read before. However, I do think that some of the quotes I pull out will be intersting to others, and may help them find books to read based on what I’ve written.

  The final quote on this is:

  The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence about what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest forms of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the food or books he really likes in favour of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and opinions.

• There’s a big discussion of the past, present, and future, as it relates to humans, and I liked the following:
  

  … the Future is, of all things, the least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with Eternal Rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humansism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

• I’ve always been drawn to “East meets West” type philosphy, in things like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and other writings, mostly with respect to the subject object duality seen in cultures of the West that is often lacking in the East, but also with how the present is dealt with in different ways. I’ve seen some similarities between what Jesus teaches and Eastern thought on the present. So the following really struck me:
  

  If … he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.

• The following is so true — many churchgoers criticize things that are not worth criticizing, i.e. not criticizing possible doctrinal issue, but instead critizing largely irrelevant itmes, which in the end just distracts them from the real purpose of churchgoing:
  

  What He [God] wants of the layman in chruch is an attitde which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise — does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivitiy to any nourishment that is going.

• Here’s another thing that is very true, and that probably all of us have struggled with! I like to think I have gotten better at it over the years.
  

  … nothing throws [a person] into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.

• I like the following… It’s true for me (and not just in this example), but I love seasonal change. That’s one of the things that started getting on my nerves about FL!
  

  He [God] has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.

• Another very true thought, this one a difference between men and women, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this in the past. Hopefully I will improve as I mature:
  

  A woman means by unselfishness … taking trouble from others; a man means not giving trouble to others…. a man will live long in the Enemy’s [God's] camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman does every day.

• And finally (this is from Screwtape Makes a Toast, which was written much later than the letters):
  

  All said and done, my firends, it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by ‘religion’ ever vanishes from earth. It can still send us the truly delicious sins…. Nowhere do we tempt so succesfully as on the very steps of the altar.

So, I really want to read this book again and take more time to study it, to think about some of the deeper thoughts more. I highly recommend this book — one of the best I’ve read in some time.

I saw Dr. J. today, 1st time since just before Thanksgiving. That visit was somewhat unscheduled but my patella tendon had really been bothering me so I asked him to take a look. At the time he didn’t think much of it and just thought more time would help.

Since then, the patella tendon is feeling much better, but I have done very little working out or PT the past few weeks due to the holidays and baby Reece, 2 months old today. I did some elliptical and swimming last week in DC, as well as some walking. The last I tried running was several weeks ago and it did not feel up for it at all.

What I’ve now figured out is that any impact activities, like running, or even walking down a steep hill, don’t feel good at all. So things like biking and elliptical seem to be ok, but I haven’t really pushed them too hard or too long. About 45 min on the elliptical and 40 min mtn biking is it. But those seem to be ok.

At any rate, the Dr. was a bit more pessimistic today. I think he was surprised that I’m still hurting 4 months out. He wants to have another MRI done to see if the fall I had caused any problems, or if the scarring is messed up, or if there’s a loose piece of cartilage, etc. So that is scheduled for this Friday, and I’ll post an update after I see him again next Thursday.