you could make a killing.

 "Everybody makes mistakes, most people make the same ones over and over again." —Detective Sarah Linden, The Killing.

I've just finished the second season of The Killing (US), and though in retrospect you could really have guessed most of the answer from the beginning, I found much to enjoy in the telling. Now I'm going to make Mara watch the original Danish version (Forbrydelsen) with me, because apparently (and not so so surprisingly) they're quite different in pacing and tone. There's a NYT article here about the differences if you have no plans to watch either or already have.

Also, I'm looking for a job. Anyone who needs something done that I'm any good at, hit me up.

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roasted cardamom applesauce.

What is it about the pleasure of watching a medium-crappy movie on TV, with extended commercial breaks and subtitles you're mostly not reading, etc. Why is this often more attractive to me than selecting a DVD I actually own and enjoy watching. Ironic distance? No chance of being diappointed? No requirement for paying total attention?

Case in point: watching the textbook Hollywood beginning of the John Grisham "classic" The Firm, whose mind-bogglingly simpleminded 1980s-ness is lent a piquantly stupid counterpoint via an often mindlessly inappropriate Dave Grusin piano score. I have yet to tire of the overall badness.

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So I'm still not eating sugar. Or I'm back to not eating sugar, but yesterday's wonderful dessert moment is haunting me a bit. It's a cold, dark, unpleasant day out. I'm just puttering around trying to recognize new messes I made and then got used to over the past three weeks so I can re-eliminate them.

Why not fill the house with a supportive, comfortable scent whose eventual physical manifestation will not fuck up my nutrition goals for the day I thought to myself. Thus we have this on its way.

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roasted cardamom and cinnamon applesauce.

750g apples (I used 4 or 5), quartered
8 cardamom pods, split, black seeds inside removed and crushed in a mortar/pestle
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp sea salt
1/2 cup water
3 stevia tablets, wasn't even noticeable as stevia
a handful of crushed, toasted almonds for texture

obviously a pat of browned butter or creme fraiche or ice cream or dulce de leche or all of the above would be ideal if you were someone else

The whole thing ends up being about 400 calories as written.

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hit me.

On my way through Westerpark to see Filmhuis Cavia's showing of an actual 16mm celluloid copy of Blue Velvet at the Buurtboerderij, complete with speed and focus problems. An unexpected bonus was the ambient stereo environment provided by a herd of live goats several meters away and a house music festival off in the distance. All this sonic goodness was followed by a gig I didn't say yes to, which is still a hard thing to do (not saying yes), but during the movie gentle waves of gratefulness kept lapping at my feet while I focused on nothing else but the story in front of me.

djangooooooooooo.

I finally got a CineVille pass (€18/month for unlimited films in 19 of the Randstad's most interesting independentish theatres, including our neighborhood stalwart The Movies), so we headed east to see Django Unchained yesterday at Kriterion. Be aware that if you show up for a 5:40 movie, the kitchen is closed (lunch is over at 4:30) and your only food choices are candy bars, chips, and "nachos". In Amsterdam "nachos" means "tortilla chips with 1/4 the amount of salsa you need".

Django: I reeeeally liked the first half, no one else makes movies like that. But it all needed editing and in the second half the entertaining wordiness and cheery surreality kind of dissolved away amidst all the necessary bloodshed, leaving us pretty much with Kill Bill,Vol 4. Spellchecker is trying to tell me amidst is not a word. Amid? Amidst is totally a word.

Coming up: a post on healthyish desserts even I can make. For instance I want to do something with roasted bananas, date syrup, hangop (English please? Strained yogurt or buttermilk, but there must be something that sounds better than that), and toasted hazelnuts. Also an attempt to clean out our "miscellaneous flours/grains" cupboard. Millet? Buckwheat? I'm looking at you.

stroker, cranker, or tweener?

We're celebrating this rainy afternoon by going bowling. Yesterday Cole and I celebrated the usual lack of rain by playing every sport. During the football portion of the proceedings I, again, overcome by inspiration, completely ignored the hostile physical contours of this cactus-infested backyard and AGAIN took a nasty spill in the end zone, here's the showable part of my external injuries:

Who knows what further damage was sustained internally, I feel like a punching bag today. But is this stopping me from throwing myself (hopefully not literally this time) once more into the fray? No, let's see how an indoor sport goes.

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In more placid news, it was my dear mother's directive that before I left, for fun we would watch all of this year's Oscar contenders for Best Film. We're not going to make it. Tonight is the last one on our schedule, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Last night was Argo. Sunday was Lincoln. Etc. So far Silver Linings Playbook has been the only one to mean anything to me, but that's probably only true because I can't bring myself to see Amour even though Haneke is one of my absolute favorite living directors...I know that one will mean way too much to me. I do really want to see Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained but the folks have already seen them. None of us have any interest at all in Life of Pi or Le Mis. We haven't managed to find The Master anywhere, it's not out on DVD til 26 Feb and it's gone from theaters here.

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Elsewhere: tonight's vegetarian option will be butternut and black bean enchiladas, recipe forthcoming. Basically I need black beans; vegetarian boy to decide if he wants red or green; make the sauce, add beans and cheese to filling; bake.

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dans la maison.

I should do this every week: went to The Movies today to watch a French movie with Dutch subtitles. French is not totally ununderstandable to me, and therefore not totally ignorable as if it were Hungarian or Finnish. So between understanding 15% of the spoken French, understanding 85% of the Dutch subtitles, and trying to find time to enjoy the actors' faces and other cinematic kinds of things: it was exhausting, the degree of difficulty magnified by the fact that the film was a very talky meta-movie about writing.

But it was mostly great, go see it. The first half especially spins out an inescapable and very suspenseful Rear Window-style Viewer Implication Trap for you to fall into. It kind of overreaches and can't make up its mind a bit in the 2nd half, and I think the ending is a bit of a letdown, but I can't say for sure because the audio disappeared very distractingly with about 15 minutes to go. Because it's a François Ozon movie, I wondered for a second if this was on purpose, some kind of a Haneke-style trick, but when the subtitles kept going it became clear there was a malfunction somewhere.

But everyone kept watching and reading subtitles, and after a few minutes you could hear someone in the rafters or behind the screen doing some troubleshooting. They popped in and apologized for the nuisance and went back to trying to fix it.

Five minutes later the sound came back and we watched the remaining 8 minutes or so of the movie, and I couldn't help imagining what would've happened next in an American movie theater in this situation: people storming the ticket counter to demand their money back, etc.

What happened instead was that, as the credits started to roll, a The Movies employee came into the theater and offered to "replay" the last 15 minutes of the movie for anyone that wanted to see it again with sound. Nobody did.

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And then we came home and I made those ol'chile-orange mussels and some sweet potato fries that were actually fried, in a skillet, fried in an expensive amount of coconut oil (roughly 3 minutes per side) with some fresh rosemary and sage leaves thrown in for aromatherapy and then the whole mess sprinkled with salt and smoked paprika. Then dipped in sriracha ketchup. Worth repeating.

And then finally, a boozy and tart €0.75 reklame dessert from De Avondmarkt that I enjoyed so much, I now want to taste the real thing.

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schwarzwälder kirschtorte (black forest cake).

cake
1 and 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1 and 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup shortening
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 and 1/2 cups buttermilk ´

filling
1/2 cup kirsch
1/2 cup unsalted butter
3 cups icing sugar
1 pinch salt
1/4 cup espresso
1 and 1/2 lbs fresh black cherries

icing
2 cups heavy whipping cream
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 cup kirsch

°°°

son of jerk.

I mentioned ze Barbecue Bible the other day, and yesterday I remembered the other reason I bought it: finally a reliable, refindable set of jerk recipes.

I've only made jerk a few times since living in Holland and frankly it's never really worked out, I guess b/c in America we used to tweak Penzey's jerk blend, which was easy and perfect, and dus I never had to develop my own recipe.

So I think the below recipe solves the problem. Last night I made some jerk chicken plus a pineapple-papaya salsa (pineapple, papaya, red onion, salt, lime, cilantro), something called "shogun slaw" with shredded carrots and ginger, and some sweet potatoes, oh yeah and some basic black beans. All good, and good together. Then we tried to watch Four Lions but failed b/c it wasn't what we were expecting or in the mood for, not to say it wasn't interesting.

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jerk marinade (in progress)

2 scotch bonnet chiles, deveined and deseeded
4 scallions, green and white
1 red onion
2 shallots
3 cloves garlic
1 tbsp grated ginger
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp dried thyme
2 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
5 tbsp lime juice
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 cup water
3 tbsp neutral oil

Process all this shit. If you're marinating fish or shrimp, an hour or two is good. Chicken or pork more like 6. This is enough marinade for a kilo of something, including enough volume for you to boil the marinade and use as a sauce afterwards.

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get the shot.

I would take a picture of myself right now but I don't need to b/c I found one on the internets, above.

When it comes to food prepared under the influence of the demon weed, Lance knew his shit: late-night cereal is where it's at. I like to serve mine (no Fruit Brute for me: I opt for the very responsible and adult All-Bran Flakes) with icy, icy cold milk, perfectly ripe bananas and a little maple syrup. And maybe some almonds sometimes. And yes, cartoons if possible, eighty-six the fuckin' ODing chicks.

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all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

Yay me, I finally went to EYE today for the Kubrick thing, a day well spent. For non-Amsterdammers, the EYE is that white spaceship building in the photos above (next to Malcolm McDowell's giant face) and below (looming futuristically), it's where our old Filmmuseum was relocated to, a forced relocation that I used to regard as completely boneheaded and emblematic of Amsterdam's increasing disregard for historic cultural institutions...but after today I think I might be a convert in this one specific instance.

The exhibit itself was, tja, well done, though I could've stood a few more prop kind of things. There were plenty of great relics nonetheless: note below, the axes on the wall behind the model hedge maze (unique sentence alert?). Also note that the Dr. Strangelove round table is actually a plastic model the size of a dinner plate.

Seeing The Shining itself on the big screen (and more importantly, with excellent, appropriately loud sound) was like watching it for the first time: it was a truly visceral, mildly terrifying experience in the theater, much more so than it ever was on a TV set (where I've probably seen it three or four times), and I mean that in the best way.

After a wintry and mountainous three hours with Jack and the gang, it was disorienting to walk out into a muggy but beautiful afternoon on the water, and the EYE building itself was a surprisingly nice place to hang, especially the rocky little "beach" just outside. There's a grassy patch as well, might even be a smart little picnic spot if you're visiting the EYE around a mealtime.

projections.

I took 7 pictures on the four-minute bike ride to The Movies today. As projected, we saw Meek's Cutoff, which was, mm, good enough I guess, but my expectations were pretty high. It was good. I think it would've been even better if it had allowed itself 10 more minutes to end pretty much exactly the same way it did end.

It's a real story, which I didn't know, or at least it's "fact-based" (I don't recommend following this link if you plan on seeing the movie), and yeah reading about the Oregon Trail just now made my own personal emigration traumas seem pretty darn inconsequential in comparison.

Other movie plans for the week might include finally fucking going to the Kubrick exhibit at Eye today at 13:30 to see The Shining on the big screen because it's my last chance (It's my last chance b/c as you may remember I'm unleashing myself on America in a week or so). Johnny D also hipped me to the fact that there's a new Leos Carax movie called Holy Motors that needs watching. I saw Pola X when it came out and while I can't say I loved it, it was provocative and had a nice soundtrack. And "unsimulated sex", as Wikipedia calls it.

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This next paragraph was a tie to Meek's Cutoff before I added all the other text above, but I'll leave it here anyway: speaking of water, the water on the bridge below (it doesn't really look like a bridge I guess)? It's because when it gets too hot here the bridges stop working, meaning that they stop opening and closing to let boats through. It doesn't happen every year, but the last few it has. So there are city workers in lawn chairs sitting there with big hoses hosing the bridges down all day.

take shelter.

I'm hoping the Great Magnet will cut me some slack on this: for a long time I've been amazed at the consistent paths that tornadoes take through northern Georgia. If the American weatherpeople are ever talking about "severe weather" in the southeast US, I'd say roughly 90% of the time it will pass through northern Atlanta. I don't want to get into this right now b/c I have things to do, but remind me to tell you someday about my tornadophobia (or possibly astraphobia).

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When I was 12 or so (thought you didn't have time for this, yo?), my family moved to Atlanta from Albany, NY somewhere far outside of Philadelphia, PA, and shortly thereafter my relationship to weather changed forever. Back in the 70s, up in Philadelphia the "worst" thing that could happen to you from a meteorological perspective would be snow, lots of snow.

But, unlike tornadoes, snow can also be fun, and in fact, if you're a kid and you don't have to drive in it, snow is pretty much nothing but fun and adventure and days off from school and going over to your neighbor's house to look at his dad's Playboys and accidentally finding nude Polaroids of his extremely churchgoing mom. Ah, snow days.

I'm not sure exactly how long it was after we moved to Atlanta that I was introduced to the very unsnowlike pleasures of lightning, but I still remember it with the vivid persistence of a really bad dream.

It was summertime, I was outside playing with some friends that I don't remember except that they were blond, we were in some kind of semi-wilderness area that wasn't part of any subdivision or neighborhood. Maybe it was a construction site on its way to becoming a subdivision. Anyway it was probably 10 minutes away from my house on foot down a two-lane highway.

The way summer storms happen in the south is that the sky gets really low and becomes a beautifully threatening bluish-grey with charcoal-colored accents, and the feeling of the air changes, as if things get more quiet. Maybe they do. And then fat warm raindrops start smacking into you with great velocity. Things rarely start with a polite drizzle.

This goes on for five or so transitional minutes until the real rain starts. And at that point, you should really be somewhere other than outside. If you're in a car, it's hard to drive b/c you can't see. And no one can see, so driving gets stupid quickly. If you're on foot, you're just being drenched in a punishing (yet warm) way.

So far, this all sounds OK, even to me. But the lightning that accompanies these storms is unusually, shittily aggressive. I mean, if you go to Wikipedia and look up "lightning", the first picture is one of Atlanta being struck rather spectacularly by lightning.

So anyway, we were outside playing. And it started to rain, rather typically slow and sparsely, and then suddenly rather emphatically hard and with impressive density. Being American kids and it being summer, we had no "rain gear", so we gave up on whatever adventure we were engaged in and started heading for the nearest of our houses, which I think was mine; first laughing and talking and walking, and then jogging silently as we got wetter and wetter.

And then the lightning started, it all happened very fast, not this business where you see the lightning and then hear the thunder later, allowing you to gauge how far away the storm is; but both happening at exactly the same time, really close by, somewhere behind us. At this point in my teenage development, I knew a few bits of conventional wisdom for "how not to get hit by lightning": 1) don't hide under a tree, 2) don't stand near a metal fence, 3) avoid power lines.

The big problem with my then-current situation was that the only way to get back to our neighborhood was to go down this typical American two-lane road. It had nowhere for pedestrians to be, so no sidewalks. On one side of the road was a very long metal chain-link fence with a line of tall pine trees right up next to it. On the other side was a rather low-slung set of power lines that I seem to remember you could even hear humming.

I remember weighing the options as to which side seemed safer, but I don't remember why I suddenly chose to sprint across the road to the side with the power lines, probably because parents and teachers really drill the thing about avoiding trees into your young little brain. Anyway, I wasn't over there for 60 seconds before a deafening crack-boom and tremendous flash of purple-white light exploded directly over my head, maybe 3 meters above me...everything stopped, I was sure I was dead.

And yet I was still running, so, yeah, not. After that, I like to imagine what I must've looked like to the outside observer by the time I was approaching our neighborhood: through some kind of bionic teenage adrenaline boost, I remember feeling like I was running faster than anyone had ever run. I was surprised and impressed that my friends were keeping up with me, except they weren't: when I finally turned to look behind me I could see them flailing and panting off in the distance.

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When I have time I'll fill you in on my late summer nights in our house in Atlanta waking Mara up to tell her to get in the basement during tornado warnings; but for now I'll just say that I'm pretty sure the above experience is at the root of my problems with thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Although there's more to it: I can't really mention all this without mentioning Take Shelter (below). I saw it a couple weeks ago and it struck me (ha) rather hard, for a number of reasons, and then I read this interview with the director, in which he said:

"When I began writing Take Shelter in the summer of 2008, I was in the middle of my first year of marriage. Although both my career and personal life were on a positive track, I had a nagging feeling that the world at large was heading for harder times. This free-floating anxiety was part economic, part just growing up, but it mainly came from the fact that I finally had things in my life that I didn't want to lose."

That was totally me in 1998.

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EDIT: I realized after puzzling over the memories generated by the story above that I'd misremembered almost everything in terms of time and place. I'm pretty sure the lightning strike in question actually happened up in Pennsylvania because I think I was running home with J.J. Lapp, the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen up to that point in my life, and her brother, both very blond. And I know for certain that finding my neighbor's mom's naked pictures happened in Atlanta during my first experiment with skipping a lot of school (like weeks of school), not a snow day at all. Ah well. It all still happened.

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lucky number 13.

Above: I'm listening to a Dutch podcast which is all about cinema, and the episode I checked out last night was an interview with the director of the above film, 170 hz, for which I found the sound design kind of potentially interesting.

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So, sleepless or not, this is one of the few days so far that I have started out as intended, by doing all of the things normal people do at the beginning of the day: make the bed, take a shower, straighten up, etc. It has a certain appeal, I can see that even through my insomniac coma.

Thusly engorged with success, I'm going to now try what for me has become one of the hardest things there is: do one uninterrupted hour of efficient work without stopping to press my completely worn-out dopamine button via any of the tiny distractions that normally end up derailing me. OK here I go wish me luck.

It's 9:49am.

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OK, I did have this one important consideration that needed considering, and I'm wondering how helpful this would be, considering this.

And can someone get to the bottom of the current state of research on THC/dopamine interaction? Opinions seem to vary widely, but as far as I can tell any interaction seems to be related to behavior/limbic reward rather than actual cannabinoid/neurotransmitter shit.

It's 10:17am.

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basbousa.

Wow, I just had a blip of a flashback/fantasy where I wrote a piece of code that went out to the online TV Guide, looked at the three to seven Hollywood films that are on the major Dutch networks every night, then went out to Metacritic and found out their metascores and averaged them, so I could have like a daily Cultural Apocalypse Quotient just handed to me.

Tonight's is a good one: we have Demolition Man (34/100), The Saint (50/100), Night at the Museum 2 (42/100), A Cinderella Story (25/100), and Intolerable Cruelty, which gets a 71 out of 100, BUT unfortunately stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, for whom Mara and I harbor such an irrational hatred that we are unable to watch any movie featuring her except High Fidelity (79/100), so there would be some automatic adjustment code happening for special cases like this.

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Ummm....right. A few days ago I sent Mara an article from Serious Eats about 10 great winter desserts featuring oranges or something, oh wait here it is. I sent it to her because she really likes winter oranges and because I really like it when someone makes dessert for me.

Her choice from that list was the Orange Semolina Cake, which sounded great and was an interesting recipe (you puree two oranges whole, skins and all, for example): little did I know that it was essentially a recipe for one of my favorite desserts of, if not all time, then of the last 5 years or so: basbousa. Anyway, it turned out really really authentic-tasting, and if you want some, come by, 'cause there's lots.

Speaking of which, this recipe: it makes an imposingly dense cake that you will want to share with other people. We tripled the amount of syrup in the original recipe because that's the only way it really seemed like the basbousa that I know.

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orange semolina cake (aka basbousa, revani).

syrup
2 cups sugar
3 tbsp lemon juice
3 tsp orange blossom water
2 and 1/4 cup water

cake
2 almost softball-sized navel oranges, scrubbed
3/4 cup olive oil
3/4 cup sugar
5 large eggs
2 cups semolina
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup almond flour
1 cup untoasted almonds with skins, chopped

Fill a medium pot halfway with water. Add oranges and boil until softened, about 45-60 minutes, you might have to add more water. Drain and let cool. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9 1/2 inch cake pan.

In a small saucepan, combine sugar, lemon juice, orange blossom water, and water. Bring heat to medium and cook, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves. Let mixture come to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for 6 minutes. Let cool.

Quarter oranges and remove the seeds but not the skin. Place oranges in a food processor and pulse until you have a smooth pulp. In a large bowl, combine orange pulp, oil, sugar, and eggs. Beat with an electric mixer until smooth. In a small bowl, whisk together semolina, baking powder, and almond flour. Stir dry ingredients into orange mixture.

Pour batter into pan and garnish top with chopped almonds. Bake until a cake tester comes out clean, about 40 minutes, but keep an eye on the almonds on top, ours browned really fast and we had to cover the top with foil. Cool cake for ten minutes then pour syrup over the top.

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my birthday dinner.

These were actually the best bitterballen I've ever had. And not just because I was rabidly hungry. Our movie at Kriterion (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) started 20 minutes late and then had the gall to last 127 more minutes. Which meant that by the time we got to Cafe Maxwell (above) to taste their supposedly delicious 14-euro burger, the kitchen was closed.

But the deep fryer was open and my blood sugar was dangerously low, so we ordered some bitterballen, which we kind of expected to be the most pathetic and bad birthday dinner ever, but they were actually way more edible than your average bitterbal. There was a hint of curry to them and, I don't know, they were just pretty much delicious.  Then we had a couple more beers, then we came home and ate a bag of BBQ Baked Lays (which have somehow only just arrived in Holland) with sour cream.

steak ssäm.

It's what we made tonight. Steak. Ginger-scallion sauce. Kimchi puree. Also a buttermilk-sriracha dressing. Also quick-pickled beets and cucumbers. Just look here.

Why did we make all this fun stuffs? We was hung over b/c the Winter of Death made us drink. For those of you not here: it's coooold. And windy. And there's like 3 hours of daylight.

OK more like 6. And it's not even really cold yet. My point is, we went to In de Wildeman (above) with Klary and Zora and Swami Peter and stayed for several hours and now we're hung over so we're inside cooking Momofuku food.

It's weather that's made for being inside. And in this apartment, being inside means not only cooking but also watching movies. We tend to accumulate DVDs in spurts, one side effect of which is that we don't always have time/inclination to watch everything when it shows up at our door. One side effect of which is that we have some pretty great movies just sitting around waiting for us to look at them.

I just went out to Metacritic and looked at their Highest Scores of All Time (which, yes, I realize is not the same as Greatest Movies of All Time, but), and from that list the things we have at home that I've yet to watch is: Fanny and Alexander; Pan's Labyrinth; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; Beau Travail; The Lives of Others; Eyes Without a Face; Tarnation; Songs From the Second Floor. Not a bad place to start, and that's just things that have either been released or re-released since 1995 or so.

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classic swedish cinema.

This post is in progress. Since I've known I was coming here, I had great plans to fill in the gap that is my knowledge of Swedish cinema. It's a gap that's a trifle odd, considering the number of movies I've seen that would be filed in the "Scandinavian" section at Silver Screen...but I guess these were all Danish and Norwegian.

So yesterday, since the weather here has been pretty uniformly autumnal (you probably can't use this word this way, can you), we started in on a mental list of "must-see Swedish films", a list of course tailored to my own tastes, and one that started with En kärlekshistoria (1970), but contained a lot of other things which I am already forgetting, so here is where I am writing them down.

A Swedish Love Story was very good: wistful, wry, and with a fantastically detailed attention to sound...I'd watch it again today.

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1. Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel).
   
2. Songs from the Second Floor (Swedish: Sånger från andra våningen).
   
3. My Life as a Dog (Mitt liv som hund).
   
4. Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons Eviga Ögonblick).
   
5. The Hunters (Jägarna).
   
6. Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander).
7. Jalla! Jalla!
   
8. Kopps (Cops). OK, this I've already seen, but need to see again, it was very funny.
   
9. The Simple-Minded Murder (Den Enfaldige Mördaren).
   
10. Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål). Seen this too, but am ready to see it again.
    
11. The Adventures of Picasso (Picasso's Äventyr).
    
12. All Things Fair (Lust och fägring stor).
    
13. I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken – gul).

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dutch oven.

Well, we didn't come close to winning Team Trivia last night, but 1) we did have a perfect first half 2) good god was our waitress cute 3) Mara impressively guessed that the airline begun in 1948 whose name means "skyward" is El-Al but 4) she talked herself out of it 5) we learned that if the question is "what movie beat out Scent of A Woman, The Crying Game, and A Few Good Men for Best Picture Oscar"...

...the year is 1992 (we were off by one), and the answer is The Unforgiven. What a shitty year for Hollywood movies that must have been: Scent Of A Woman is unwatchable, and A Few Good Men is one step up from a Grisham movie. No wonder we didn't get it. Well, OK, it was probably also the year that the four of us were least likely to care about movies in general: we had probably all just realized that we were supposed to be adults soon.

So, New Year's has changed a bit. We're now doing pulled pork with sides. Against the wishes of my advisers I am lobbying for a good coleslaw, a corn pudding, hoppin' john, and a collard green/andouille  soup. I have to do the collards b/c I already bought them.

Here's the up-to-the-minute menu.

Carolina Pulled Pork Sandwich.
Mara's Homemade Buns?
Jeanie's Slaw.
Pepperoni Niblets.
Deviled Eggs.
Gorgonzola + Whisky Spread.
Collard Greens and Andouille Soup.
Corn Pudding.
Corn Pudding (substituting cornmeal for the flour).
Corn Pudding.

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 collard green + andouille soup.

EVOO
2 links andouille sausage, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 pound collard greens, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 large sprigs fresh thyme
3 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
4 tbsp butter, browned
2 cloves garlic, minced

grated parmegiano reggiano for garnish

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black swan.

Saw Black Swan yesterday with the family...it's maybe not a movie for every family. I'm not saying it's amazing, but I liked it quite a bit, at least more than anyone else did. Then again I'm a bit of a sucker for the dimly-lit 70s horrorish stuff from De Palma and Cronenberg...

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Today we are attempting something experimental: showing the boyz where pizza comes from. This will be the first time the full 8-member family is together, and it's always a question of what to make that intersects with everyone's food preferences. Pizza is an easy answer.

The stock response to this menu decision would be "let's just buy a bunch of pizza from somewhere", but I am a bit pained by the kids' disconnection from real food. 90% of what they eat is pretty garbagey stuff that comes from a box or can or the freezer or McDonalds, which I find sad and uninspiring (though they do eat blueberries, apples, corn, and potatoes).

Don't misunderstand a bitch. I understand that it's hard to monitor two male toddlers and cook real food from scratch at the same time, especially if cooking is not something that relaxes you. And I understand the argument that "they don't like anything else" other than highly processed food, but this is kind of a chicken/egg thing: if you start out with MSG and HFCS as your introduction to solid food, yeah, it's hard (and time-consuming) to cook healthier food at home that can compete with that on a taste level.

So, since Mara and I have nothing but time here, we thought we'd see if 1) the boyz would be interested in seeing what happens to pizza before the delivery man shows up at your door, and 2) we can make food from scratch that 5-year-olds will eat.

It's thoroughly probable that they won't care at all about where pizza comes from, or will decide that today is the one day they "don't want pizza", and I am fully aware that it will be a real challenge to cook food that resembles what they're used to in the taste department.

Here are the pizzas under discussion:

Dylan: tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni
Cole: tomato sauce, mozzarella
Erica: some kind of veggie
Kyle: not sure
Pitts: tomato sauce, mozzarella, mushroom and onion
Dad: white pizza with parmesan and truffle oil
MT: margherita
Me: pear, gorgonzola, arugula

Something with rosemary would be nice, but I don't see where it would go. We're also going to try one or more of the adult pizzas on the grill, which should be an adventure.

To make things even more adventurous, it's possible that at some point in the afternoon our cooking will be fueled by these delicious cocktails that Dad turned us on to last night.

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the ritz 75.

1/2 oz fresh lime juice
1/2 oz fresh mandarin juice
1/2 oz simple syrup
2 oz gin
1/2 cup champagne

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hup me.

You know what? There's a reason that the streets aren't overflowing with pickled watermelon rind. I sat down in front of the TV before bed last night, not because this is a normal ritual or anything but because I'm sleeping on the couch for hotness reasons, and I thought maybe I'd take on a nice relaxing mindless task to subdue my normally restless bedtime mind.

The "unprocessed" watermelon rinds in my fridge were taking up a lot of room, so I said, even possibly out loud (I guess maybe addressing the cats? Not good.), "Hey, let's get those dang ol'-timey pickles started," or something similar, and then assembled a bowl, two vegetable peelers, a sharp knife, and my rinds.

Right, and Jade. In the last couple of evenings before bed I've been trying to watch it on Hulu, primarily because it's free, but also because it seems to be doing a wonderful job of putting me to sleep. I really haven't been able to watch more than 15 minutes at a time, which is an unusual distinction for a non-subtitled film.

There's only one issue so far, which is some kind of (hopefully) horrific scene near the end of the film that involves lots of bloodcurdling screams and screechy violins. This tends to wake me up, but after the first time it happened (during which I assumed that the screams were coming from one of the inhabitants of my apartment), I seem to have learned that "It's just Jade", and then I roll over and go back to sleep.

It's not a good movie in the traditional sense of the word "good", but of course this is why I'm watching it. It's not just a bad movie, but a bad movie made by experts in bad moviemaking such as Joe Eszterhas (Showgirls, Basic Instinct), Chazz Palminteri, and the amazing David Caruso. Plus it's a noir, and well I love to see good ones or bad ones. But also: a then-35-year-old Linda Fiorentino is in it, and I defy you to find a man my age who wouldn't think that's a good thing.

Watermelon rind. My point. I sat down expecting some mind-numbing but productive task a la cleaning green beans, shelling peas, husking corn, pitting cherries, etc. What I got instead was something far more epic, a fight to the death between human and fruit. I lost. After fifteen minutes of increasingly agitated attacks by me, all ending with the watermelon remaining totally unscathed, I said "fuck that", viciously stabbed the watermelon one more time and then painfully stepped on a vegetable peeler that had fallen by the wayside. Mindless? Yes. Relaxing? Less so.

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I could whine some more about the heat, but really, who wants to hear it. I will say that I went for a two-hour bike ride to cool off today, and yes, that was a great idea by me, much better with a manufactured breeze. And now there are just the faintest stirrings of a real breeze coming through my windows so I imagine general relief is on the horizon.

Got a manly dinner/Scrabble/World Cup date tomorrow. Will probably do catfish in Ethiopian butter with a tart cayenne-mango salsa, and a yellow zucchini thing with a little shoarmaspice, feta, mint and that tahini-sriracha-buttermilk stuff. I also have a little pork belly sitting around, now what should I do with that, some kind of little appetizery thing. Tell me. Teach me.*

I was thinking about this, minus the quinces.

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* Back when we had our record store (ha moop), we used to get the cutest handwritten faxes from a very sweet old Japanese man named Tomonori. His manner of asking us about our new releases was, "Teach me about any new releases! Teach me!!!"

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pork belly rub.

2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
1/2 tsp powdered bay leaf
finely grated zest of a large orange

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back and forth.

))<>((

Me And You And Everyone We Know (2005), Roger Ebert's 5th Best Movie of the Decade.

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Um, I'm still like on a Cameo intravenous drip, they're keeping me afloat. In this thematically-connected episode, we see Former Guitar Teacher in an even scarier outfit (w/hair extensions???). He makes a couple of brief appearances throughout, but really enters the scene at 3:10, just after Miles Davis disappears (it's actually Miles Davis, and if you'd read that interview with Pat I posted, you'd know why, wouldn't you).

It's a terrible radio edit of the actual guitar solo, I'd be totally pissed. In fact, he looks totally pissed. Wu-Tang people will already know "Back and Forth" as the sample from "Gravel Pit".