So tonight I cooked a whole tilapia. Not sure why - maybe because we had whole wood-fired fish in Bucerias last month, and I absolutely loved it. Maybe because the husband is in Puerto Penasco this weekend eating fresh fish tacos, and I'm not. Maybe because the fish was $1.80, which makes it a pretty cheap experiment. Regardless, whole fish seemed like a good idea.

I've never cooked a whole fish before. So where did I start? YouTube, of course. Where else does one go to learn how to clean a fish? Of course, it turns out that when you buy a fish from the store it's already cleaned, but I didn't know that when I started. Von's did a nice job - their cleaning looked pretty much like YouTube's!

YouTube also started me out with scoring the fish and stuffing it. But then it was just too cumbersome to figure out ingredients and amounts, so I switched to google blog search. I didn't just want a recipe - I wanted descriptive language. Mission accomplished; I found a post that mentioned that vinegar is a good marinade component, since it mellows out the "fishiness" of perviously frozen fish.

So, why am I talking about cooking in my learning blog? As I switched between tools to find exactly what I was looking for in each stage of the process, it occurred to me that I was meeting Common Core State Standards, I gathered relevant information from multiple sources and integrated the information (Writing Anchor Standard 8), and I used appropriate tools strategically (Standard of Mathematical Practice #5). I exhibited the standards in an authentic performance assessment, with a pretty distinct criteria for success - Is it edible?

I would rank my fish experiment at low proficient. Taste was great, but getting the filets off wasn't very clean. Definitely not advanced - I should have taken the advice of another blog and broiled it for a minute at the end to get the crispy skin. But I feel empowered to try it again, which is the whole point in learning, right?