I have two supposedly authoritarian cookbooks on the cuisine of Chile that say Pablo Neruda's favorite fish soup is made with Conger Eels. This is wrong.

There are no Conger Eels harvested (or harvestable) off the coast of Chile. In Chile the word "Congrio" names the Pink Cusk-eel, which is not an eel, but a regular fish that looks sort of like a short stubby eel.     Cusk-Eels.

I found that I'd already done a recipe for Caldillo de Congrio way back in 2013, backed by extensive research. I just didn't know the Pablo Neruda connection back then. So, though I rarely mark books, I wrote corrections into both those cookbooks.

Now, as for the "Conger Eel" I bought in Vietnam, I had forgotten that what they were selling was "Pike Conger" a pretty much inedible eel, since it's thoroughly shot through with thread-like bones.

That is, it's considered inedible except in Kyoto Japan, where it is laboriously prepared by highly trained chefs and sold at an astronomical price. This is fine, because, to the Japanese, a super high price is the greatest flavor enhancement there can be (Pike Conger is actually really bland). Heck, they pay a fortune for Chilean Sea Bass (officially Patagonian Toothfish, but who can sell a fish with a name like that?), and it's about as bland as fish gets - it's just very expensive. It's flown to Japan after purchase from pirate fishing boats that race coast guard cutters to the safe harbors of the African coast.

This Pike Conger thing is tradition. Long ago the Daggertooth Pike Conger was the only fish so tough it could survive the multi-day trip from the sea to Kyoto. Today the chefs always start with a live Pike Conger.

So, I needed to get this fish out of my freezer compartment, which was rather crowded with that whole Ox Tail in there. Well, there's one thing you can do with this sort of problem fish - I scraped all the flesh from the skin and bones and made Thai Fried Fish Patties, eaten with Thai Cucumber Sauce. A little more difficult than the equally inedible Featherfish, and not quite as good, but pleasant enough.

About 350,000 tonnes of Pike Conger is harvested each year, most of which goes into making imitation crab meat.

the weird Chinese Cauliflower wasn't a problem. It's already a gourmet item in the farmer's markets of the San Francisco Bay area - natural, since Cauliflower is a cold weather vegetable not much grown in Southern California.

I don't expect problems with the Ox Tail either - but Eris is always hanging around.

Oooooo! - total power failure - save and shut down!

------------ Sunday AM -------------------

Dang that Eris, you just mention her name and she lets you know she's on the job - while her sister Harmonia just sits around doing her nails.

Power came back on at 4:30 am. The clanking of my Xerox ColorCube printer woke me up. Reason for failure or method of restoring power unknown.

Places all around me had lights, but power distribution here is really weird so that doesn't mean much. I did make a call to Edison, and the nice lady said she'd have a crew out as soon as possible.

. . along with some in communications with several women, and others stuff, I intend to extract and attach to the autobiographic obituary I've started on Clovegarden.

I'm writing my own obit, because I know no-one else will do it. I can't even get anyone to write up people who were actually important to them. An era and an extended community are near closing, and none of the surviving participants can be bothered with recording any of it.

It's become like an archaeological dig - like what the archaeologists are doing in the Pacific War Zone, digging up what remains to find out what actually happened, because nobody bothered to record it at the time.