culinary disappointment

I never had a functional broiler until we bought our current house, so I'm weak on technique there. (We must have had one when I was growing up, but if so it's something I never learned about from my mother.) A few nights ago I decided to broil some fish. I like fish and have always baked it, but I like the taste of broiled when I've had it elsewhere so I figured I'd give it a shot.

I had a package of frozen fillets (just fish -- not breaded or otherwise augmented). I thawed it and followed the instructions on the package, which recommended broiling for 10-15 minutes. At 10 minutes it was nowhere near done; at 15 minutes it was still nowhere near done (I couldn't cut the piece in half with a spatula). At about 22 minutes I took it out; the edges were thoroughly done and the inside bottom was close to raw.

I wonder what I did wrong. I used the high setting and put the rack at the highest position that doesn't cause meat to set off the smoke detector (which is the second-highest setting available). The broiler itself works just fine for meat. Maybe I should have used the higher setting; it's probably the fat in meat that causes the smoke problem.

Oh well. Baked fish is tasty too.

SCA note

Belated congratulations to dagonell for being named the kingdom bard last Saturday!

syndication

(This feature isn't available for free accounts.)

For those who haven't noticed yet, LJ now supports RSS (a syndication method). What this means is that there is now some non-LJ content that you can get on your friends page. This is handy for sites you'd like to monitor but have trouble remembering to check in on regularly.

More information, including a list of what's available, is at syn_promo. I'd like to specifically mention the following, because the "cost" of subscribing to a feed goes down as readership goes up. (You have a quota of points.)

davebarrycolumn: just what it sounds like. Seems to be new; I don't know what the posting frequency is going to be.

dilbertdaily and foxtrot_feed: comics. There are also feeds for Doonesbury, Sinfest, Dork Tower, and some others. I've heard that the UserFriendly feed is broken.

neilgaimanblog: Neil Gaiman, creator of Sandman and other works.

Women can be sexists, too, you know.

One of my female coworkers just circulated a warning about fires at gas pumps. (It's a photocopy from something, but I'm not sure what.) It warns that almost all fires at filling stations involve women and that some number of these involve people driving away while the nozzle is still in the tank, and it basically says "be alert and warn all your friends". She sent this around to women only, with the note "Gals: please read!".

I find that I am highly offended by her behavior. (This is not a comment on the author of the report; I'm only talking about the coworker here.)

Now, for all I know the coworker might be the kind of clueless airhead who might do something like this; I don't know her well enough to say. But for her to judge that her female coworkers, but not her male coworkers, would do something like this is just plain rude. Just what was she thinking??

I have several entertaining fantasies about appropriate things to forward to her in return, but they will stay safely in my head.