The Cats' fish: Catfish!

We were watching Sunday's episode of "The Next Food Network Star" when one of the contestants prepared a pecan-crusted catfish.

Oh, man! I could see myself eating something like that! So after the show, I went to my computer to look for the recipe. I couldn't find it, but I found a similar recipe from one of the channel's stars.

And when I tasted what I made, it reminded me of being a young boy in Kansas City, Mo., where we ate a lot of catfish. Only during that time, it was all deep-fried.

This recipe gives you the best of both worlds. It has a nice breaded taste and adding pecans to it for extra texture and taste is genius. Yet it isn't deep-fried. It's pan-fried for half of it and the rest of the cooking involves the oven.

To start, you preheat your oven to 375 degrees. This may seem like a simple thing for most, but our oven takes forever to heat. So at one point I actually had to stop what I was doing and clean the kitchen table and write two thank-you cards. It takes that long.

Anyway, take two-thirds of a cup of cornmeal and a half cup of pecans. Pour those ingredients into a food processor and add some salt and pepper. Pulse until you have a breadcrumb-like consistency.

Heat up a skillet (that you feel comfortable with putting in the oven) with a quarter cup of vegetable oil. (OK, this is a lot of oil. The catfish is semi-fried, kind of like Sandra Lee's "semi-homemade").

Then take a plate with a quarter cup of flour, a bowl with an egg and a half cup of milk beat together, and a second plate with your pulsed cornmeal mixture. This is your breading station. Take out your fillet that you've salted and peppered, dip it in the flour, then the egg and the cornmeal.

Place the fillets in the skillet. Let them cook for about three minutes until they are golden brown on one side. Then flip them over and put the whole bubbling skillet in the oven. Cook the fish for about 10 minutes. It'll take more time if the fillets are thick.

I actually left them in for at least 15 minutes while I was trying to prepare the sour cream sauce in this recipe and the result was perfectly cooked fish!

I loved eating the fish with my favorite hot sauce, Cholula. This will be a recipe we will return to again!