The weather here has been gray and dreary over the past week, but we’ve been anything but. We’ve been celebrating kid birthdays at parties all over town, having multiple play dates, grabbing Chinese food off of dim sum carts — it’s been really fun, but also dizzying.

After a string of back-to-back social engagements, Ge Ge looked at me one morning and heaved a sigh. “Can we eat at home tonight, Mama? And can we have catfish?”

Of course, what the kid wants (food-wise), the kid gets, and so I prepped my skillet for some cornmeal fried catfish.

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Cornmeal fried catfish is a good ol' Southern staple. It reminds me of the times I used to spend fishing as a kid back in South Carolina. My neighborhood stocked the pond with catfish, and my grandfather and I would spend our afternoons baiting and hooking catfish for dinner. My grandmother would steam or pan-fry them, Chinese-style, but nowadays I can't look at a catfish filet without imagining it rolled around in crusty cornmeal for a crunchy-flaky bite of wonderful.

My recipe has evolved over time. I used to batter and fry with combination of milk, eggs and flour, but recently I've found that just dragging very dry filets (patted dry with paper towels) through a mixture of cornmeal, flour and spices is good enough to make a nice little coating without too much heavy batter.

I garnish mine with green onions and lemon wedges and served it with a side salad, mashed potatoes and the best roasted green beans, but this catfish is light and flavorful enough to go with just about any good vegetable side.

We ate our cornmeal fried catfish filets like fat cats on Easter, quietly and licking our fingers smugly. After dinner, the hubby and I drank a little wine sitting in our camp chairs on the driveway while the kids swirled around us on our bikes.

Yup, our suburban life might be boring a quiet, but we love it, all the same.

Don't forget to enter the giveaway for a Lily and Val Keepsake Kitchen Diary! Details here.

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