Several weeks ago, I read the original Italian Seven Fishes Christmas Eve thread and saw Lou's recipe for salmon cakes. I followed the recipe and my husband absolutely loved it. I made six large patties, but we enjoyed them so much that we both ate three each! Next time I make them, I need to remember to hide at least two of them before I serve the meal. I've got another can of salmon in the pantry, so I'll probably make them again sometime during the holidays. Anyhow, thanks for the recipe, Lou. Baked Salmon Cakes Lou (Hawk) from CF Â1/3 cup each finely chopped onion, celery, red bell pepper; microwave for 2 minutes; cool . ÂPut 1 - 14 ¾ oz. can of pink salmon in a bowl and break up larger pieces. (I removed the skin & center bone) ÂSprinkle with black pepper; ½ tsp. each of garlic & onion powder and ¼ level tsp. Old Bay Seasoning (I used salt-free Cajun seasoning), and 2 level tsp. parsley flakes. (I also added about 1 tbsp. lemon juice) ÂAdd 3 heaping tablespoons of mayonnaise. ÂFold and blend this together and add ½ cup each of flavored and plain bread crumbs.(I used all unflavored crumbs because that was all I had) ÂBeat 1 egg and add 1 teaspoon of baking powder; beat well. ÂAdd this to the salmon mix and blend with a fork until just mixed through. ÂIf the mix is too wet, add a little more bread crumbs. ÂMake 6 balls and flatten slightly to 4 inches round and ¾ inches thick. ÂBake on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil, sprayed with Pam. (I used Reynold's Release) ÂBake 20 to 25 minutes at 320 Degrees. ÂBrush with melted butter and broil on low for 5 minutes or until a golden tan. ÂServe hot or freeze separated with plastic wrap, in a Zip Lock bags or a container.

Arcy this is the explanation I found. MENU DECEMBER 9, 2017 FEAST OF THE SEVEN FISHES Some of the most delicious traditions come from Italian homes during the holidays. Although Italians always seem to take an interest in food particularly during the numerous holidays throughout the year, at Christmas, food always seems to become a priority. Apart from the many religious traditions, this is the time each year when celebration foods are prepared and families gather together to enjoy this special season. One of the most famous traditions followed each Christmas is the one for La Vigilia, or the Feast Of Seven Fishes which is celebrated on Christmas Eve. The tradition of eating seafood on Christmas Eve dates from the medieval Catholic tradition of abstinence, or in this case, refraining from the consumption of meat or milk products on Fridays and specific holy days. As no meat or butter could be used, observant Catholics would instead eat fish, often fried in olive oil. http://www.italianfoodforever.com/2017/12/feast-of-the-seven-fishes/

Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!

dbarron, Since Tim had taken a vacation week, he was here to deal with anything I was too tired or too flu-impaired to handle. There was a little napping on the couch, but not too much---I was coughing too much. I tried to always be awake, alert and involved when Lillie was home--it is such a rare treat to have her with us for a whole week that I didn't want to miss any of it. Tim really took the burden off of me as far as dealing with the pets, cooking and laundry. He's a really good guy. He probably was counting his blessings that I felt too crappy to go Christmas shopping. lol. He did have to get ready for the VFD Christmas party pretty much all by himself (usually I do most of that) and he did a great job. I skipped the party on Saturday evening because I still was coughing too much. Today I am so, so very much better. There's still a little coughing, but it probably isn't even 10% of what it was on yesterday or the day before, so I've finally turned the corner. Moni, I cannot imagine you staying home this summer instead of biking around the country or around the world. Won't that feel strange? On the other hand, you'd have a chance to do all the gardening you want to do. Amy, Thanks. I'm finally feeling better, just about when I was going to give up and go to the doctor. The difference between yesterday and today was like night and day. Hooray! Larry, That is crazy about your eye surgery. With my cancer surgery in 1999, they thought I was knocked out and I wasn't, and I remember reaching for them and literally clawing at them to tell them I was awake and aware and feeling things. I could hear them talking, but I couldn't speak. They didn't seem to notice that I wasn't unconscious the way I was supposed to be. I guess at some point the anesthesia kicked in because at some point I stopped being awake and aware, but I didn't trust that bunch after that, and my next two surgeries were with the same doctor, but a different anesthesiologist. I assume your beefsteak weed is perilla. That stuff is almost as evil as Bermuda grass and Johnson grass. Jennifer, I'm glad Baby was found. We have had chickens go broody and disappear into the woods for weeks before reappearing, and I'm always sure they are dead and gone....until they reappear. Jen, I agree that a social media blast can get you a quick response, though I hate to have to resort to that. Imagine them suddenly fixing your car when you filed a complaint with corporate. Big surprise there. Is it just me or have we arrived at the point where there's a ton of people who don't do quality work any more and who don't care that they aren't doing quality work? Nancy, Jung Seed is not a bad option if you're only buying seeds, but their bulbs and plants are small and low-quality and I'll never buy any non-seed plant items from them again based on my personal experience with them. Amy, Someone who lives in this house (and it isn't me) is not good about closing doors and gates that should be closed either. It drives me crazy. I do a much better job of controlling the dogs' activity than he does. Jesse is trying to catch up with Sasquatch in terms of growth and he is getting so big that it is starting to scare me. We don't need for him to get much bigger. It never was my intent to have a dog who is the size of a small pony inside the house. dbarron, That's a pretty little flower. Hopefully it won't prove to be invasive for you. (The plants I hope will be invasive never are, and the ones I hope will not be invasive always are....why does it work out that way?) Good luck with your fruitcake. We had a couple of uncles who always made it, and wrapped in a liquor-soaked cheesecloth and aged it properly and all that. I didn't care for fruitcake myself, but my dad did. He never made a fruitcake, but he did like making a fresh apple cake with a lot of apples and nuts in it. Now that all our grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles are gone (we have one elderly aunt still living, but I don't think she bakes much any more), no one does all that holiday baking like they once did. I kinda miss that. I bake a little here and there but not like I once did because we've all cut back on how much sugar we eat nowadays. Amy, I think you are right about Miracle Whip being less expensive than mayo---it is the one my parents always bought. I probably didn't use real mayo until I was grown up, married and buying my own groceries. We prefer mayo and haven't bought Miracle Whip in decades. Nancy, I get that catalog from The Natural Gardening Company periodically, but don't think I've ever ordered anything from them. If I did, it was decades ago, probably before we moved to OK....long before. Somebody asked which gardening catalogs had arrived. I'll list all I can from memory, but I know I won't remember them all: HPS Seeds, Wildseed Farms, Seeds N Such, Totally Tomatoes, J. W. Jung Seed, Tomato Growers Supply Company (under new ownership and I'm not sure I like them as much now), Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Park Seed, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Dixondale Farms and Vermont Bean Seed Company. There's probably others that I'm not thinking of. There have been a few bulb company catalogs over the course of the autumn, but ColorBlends is the only one whose name I can think of at the moment. While Lillie was staying with us while Chris and Jana were on their long-delayed honeymoon cruise, her great-grandmother (Jana's beloved grandmother) passed away. She had been very ill a very long time, so I don't think you could say it was unexpected, but I think it might have happened a bit sooner than they all expected. Chris and Jana didn't know about her death until their cruise ship was close enough to the USA that their text messages and social media were accessible, which I think was Friday night. We had been able to stay in touch with them via Messenger most of the time they were at sea, but we didn't know about her grandmother's death, having met that side of Jana's family only a couple of times and not knowing them well. I just hate that Jana and Chris were away when this happened, but y'all know that's just how things happen. The funeral is tomorrow. This weekend the grandkids' big thing was "I can't believe it is only 11 days until Christmas...," etc. and it is said in almost an annoyed tone of voice, like they think the time is flying by too quickly. lol. When we dropped off the kids, Chris wanted to run a test to see if the tropical birds would go to them or to us, so he let one out of the cage and told her to fly to her favorite person. I told Chris she'd fly to Tim (Chris thought she'd fly to him) and she did. lol. Then he put the bird back on top of her cage and told her to fly to her second favorite person, and she flew to me and landed on my shoulder. He was totally shocked, but we were laughing so hard. I am sure that now that the kids are back, the birds will forget us overnight and the next time they see us, they'll act like we are strangers. There. I'm all caught up on last week and this week too. For once. I am glad. I hate feeling out of the loop. Dawn