Pass The Sushi!

Lets talk about drift­ing dri­vers today. I am a young female dri­ver. My car has ‘go faster stripes’ so I do. How­ever, I don’t chat­ter on the cell phone and only answer texts at long red lights. I don’t weave dan­ger­ously between cars just to get to the next red light faster or throw my foot to the ground as hard as I can off of green (unless some­one eggs me on, then it may bring out my com­pet­i­tive side). I pay atten­tion to who else is on the road, whats going on and the sit­u­a­tions around me. I try to be a cau­tious driver…

Lately though, young (not always) female (not always) dri­ves have been scar­ing the crap out of me and I don’t want to be lumped in with them. I heard the other day on the radio there is now a study that shows women are not as good at dri­ving as men and that 2 out of 3 men are scared to be the pas­sen­ger in the car if their female part­ner is dri­ving (yet, she’s prob­a­bly the one hulling the kids around).

Whats the sud­den rush that are mak­ing more and more peo­ple drive like lunatics? Or is it just an over pop­u­la­tion + lack of proper IQ to han­dle the 2 ton machine at your fin­ger tips issue? I got run off the road the other day by a women who was on her cell phone that just had to be in my lane — with­out check­ing to see if I was there, watched a teenage boy speed the wrong way down a one way street, and saw an elderly man stop at a red light just to decide to run it any­way — at a MAJOR inter­sec­tion! It was ter­ri­fy­ing. I have a 15 minute drive to work and every day see some­thing that shocks and scares me.

So really, what is so impor­tant that peo­ple no longer care about the lives they are putting at risk?

And after that safety announce­ment: back to the cook­ing blog.

Big Daddy’s Black­ened Tilapia

from foodnetwork.com

Ingre­di­ents

Black­en­ing Spice:

• 3 table­spoons smoked paprika
• 1 tea­spoon salt
• 1 table­spoon onion powder
• 1 tea­spoon ground black pepper
• 1 tea­spoon cayenne pepper
• 1 tea­spoon dried ground thyme
• 1 tea­spoon dried oregano
• 1/2 tea­spoon gar­lic powder

For Fish:

• 4 tilapia fillets
• 2 table­spoons grape­seed oil
• 1/2 lemon, juiced

Direc­tions

In a small bowl com­bine all of the spices. Press a heap­ing table­spoon of the spice mix onto each fil­let so that both sides are lib­er­ally coated. Allow the fish to sit for 15 min­utes at room tem­per­a­ture prior to cooking.

In a large skil­let, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Once the oil is almost smok­ing, add the fil­lets and cook for 2 to 3 min­utes on each side. Sprin­kle with lemon juice and trans­fer the fil­lets to serv­ing platter.

The black­en­ing sea­son­ing for this dish was ok, how­ever, tilapia is just a bor­ing fish. I may want to try this on a cat­fish or even a salmon next time to ful­fill a fish like fla­vor. When we blacken chicken around here — its black­ened, but you can still taste the chicken. This was all black­en­ing sea­son­ing and no fish fla­vor at all. :/

On an awe­some note, my sun­flow­ers are almost as tall as the house! On a not so awe­some note, a lot of my gar­den is suf­fer­ing from the abnor­mally high heat and lack of any real rain accu­mu­la­tion… I really hope it makes it through.