Coraline (Henry Selick – 2008) B+

Looks great and is pretty creepy at times. Enjoyed this very much.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling – 1982) B-

Am I being too harsh with my grade here? Not sure. I just happened to have never seen this movie in its entirety but I heard a whole lot about it of course and I had seen bits and pieces. It was not really bad, had some good laughs, and of course Phoebe Cates, but I just do not think this is a classic that stood to the test of time. I also have a problem with the identity crisis here. We have screwball over-the-top comedy about high school students (mostly funny) and then we have a coming of age drama. The drama here is the pretty rough plot of  Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) involving an adult having sex with a minor and abortion among other things. I am not being a prude here, I’m just talking about good film making. These two genres can mix, but it is not an easy thing to do and it was not done right here.

Lobster, Mushrooms, Corn – Haddock, Beans, Beurre Blanc

I knew that I was going to cook a dish with lobster and some fish. Possibly with some sort of corn. That’s about it. See, my neighborhood grocery store was having a massive sale on live lobsters and had an excellent selection of fresh fish. I noticed the Haddock right away, for a very good price as well. Then we went and saw Julie & Julia and I knew that some sort of a classic French preparation will be used for the fish. So, the one dish, morphed into two.

I partially “steamed” two lobsters following Thomas Keller’s method (put in a pot, pour boiling water on them, let them sit for 5 minutes and your done). This method makes the lobters very easy to peel but leaves the meat pretty much raw for further cooking. Also following Thomas Keller’s method, sort of (he actually filles an Immersion Circulator’s tub with melted butter!), I cooked the lobster tails and claws sous vide in a bag with butter at 59.5 C for about 20 minutes. The lobsters were served on top of diced sauteed mushrooms. Corn and lobsters are a perfect match. So, I made a sauce with corn juice and little else. I added a squeeze of lime juice, a tablespoon of cream and a little Lecithin to the sauce to give it a good emulsified texture.

For the classic French part of the dinner, I simply dusted the haddock with Wondra flour and pan fried it in butter. Served this on top of green beans tossed with almonds, shallots and some butter. The perfect sauce for this was straight from Julia Child’s seminal book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking“. A perfect Beurre Blanc. That wonderful creamy butter sauce that we hardly see anymore. To make it, a mixture of white wine vinegar, shallots and vermouth is reduced to a couple of tablespoons. Then cool butter is whisked in gradually. You can leave the shallots in there, but I strained it and threw the shallots into the green beans. The sauce was creamy (but had no cream), tart and oh so buttery. Absolute heaven. I did screw up when plating though. I should’ve put the sauces on the plate first before the mushrooms/beans as opposed to saucing all the way at the end. That would’ve made for a better presentation.

Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron -2009) B+

I did not know what to expect from this one and I was pleasantly surprised. I knew I’d enjoy and admire the “Julia” part of course, but was not sure about the “Julie” bit. Well, Meryl Streep as the seminal Julia Child is superb and alone worth the price of admission. Less flamboyant but equally impressive is Stanley Tucci as Paul, Julia’s loving doting husband. They really had fantastic chemistry on the screen. It is very well known that Paul Child was madly in love with Julia and this came through clearly everytime the two actors were together. The story follows Julia through cooking school in Paris and the challenges of writing “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. On the other hand we have Julie, trying to cook her way through Julia’s cookbook in her little apartment in Queens. Not an easy feat at all. Amy Adams’ is very likable as the flustered, nervous and always sweet Julie.

I Love You, Man (John Hamburg – 2009) B-

It’s got it’s funny moments, but ultimately it’s just ok.

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp – 2009) B+

Enjoyed this very much. It’s a fresh take on an “Alien Invasion”. The protagonist here is sort of a douche bag called Wikus Van De Merwe (it’s way better when you actually hear it), well at least he starts off as one, that I could not help but like by the end of the film. Setting the story in South Africa’s Johannesburg is also a welcome change. In summary we have stranded prawn-like aliens who like eating cat food (and tires for desert), apartheid references, Nigerian mobsters who want to deal with and eat the aliens (to gain the power to use their weapons you see), cool as shit weapons, gore, exploding people, a sweet father-son story, shanty town (aka District 9) and even a pig used as a cannonball. What’s not to like? All in all quiet a fun package.

Alinea: BEEF, Cucumber, Honeydew, Lime Sugar

I finally found a use to the electric convection oven we have! Let me back out a little here. See, a while back one of my wife’s co-workers was remodeling and had one of those counter top electric convection ovens. It’s kind of like those you see in infomercials only a bit bigger. She asked if Diana wanted this barely used oven and it seemed like a good idea at the time. So, we picked it up and used it maybe 2 times in the last year and half. It’s been collecting dust in the closet. Sure it does work, but it takes up counter space and I’ve never needed to use it for anything that my oven cannot handle. Until now.

This Alinea recipe has been on my “to-do” list since I saw it on the Alinea Mosaic site, before the book was even out. The picture looks beautiful, it seems straight forward relatively speaking and the flavor combination cannot fail. Here we have small domino-like squares of honeydew melon, topped with beef slices, a thin cucumber strip, lime sugar, soy pudding, cilantro and pink peppercorns (I used pieces of red Thai chilies instead).

I made the lime sugar first. I mixed sugar, lime juice, salt, citric acid and egg white together. The recipe specifies adding a few drops of lime oil. That was nowhere to be found though so, I grated the zest of one lime into the mix instead figuring that should give the sugar a good boost of lime flavor. Now, the mixture is supposed to go between pieces of Teflon coated paper and into a dehydrator for 12 hours at 125F. Teflon paper? Don’t have it but I figured parchment paper should work well instead and it did. 125F?? Dehydrator? I don’t have one either. Previously I’ve managed to dry stuff successfully in my oven at about 160 or 170F. The oven does not go as low as 125F. Here’s where the convection oven came into play. It goes as low as 100F, keeps it steady AND it has a convection fan adding air to the equation. I let the mixture dry up for about 16 hours with excellent results. It had good lime flavor, it’s sweet, a bit sour with a great crunch. Lime sugar, done.

The rest of the recipe was pretty straight forward. The soy pudding is made using agar. The beef is cooked sous vide, cut into strips (1×1x4 inches) and seared. At Alinea they use Wagyu (American Kobe) beef cap. I used best quality prime ribeyes instead. I used a peeler to make the thin cucumber strips.

 

This was delicious. The taste was even better than I expected and the textures worked great. The rich beef has very little seasoning, but the salty soy pudding, the heat from the chilies and the sweet sour fragrant crunch of the lime sugar balance that perfectly. This combination is defintily worth making again whether in a fancy preparation like this or in a simpler presentation.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino – 2009) A+

Absolutely brilliant filmmaking. It might sound cliched, hell it definitely is a cliche, but Tarantino is truly a one of a kind, imitated but never duplicated, a master filmmaker. Tarantino’s version of WWII and how it ended is not be historically accurate, but I could not care less. He uses Nazi-occupied France as the set for his fictional story. The story has three threads. Of course, we have the Basterds. If all you know about this movie is from the trailers, you might think that this is what the story is about. Killing Nah-zees! The other storyline follows Shosanna, who witnessed her family’s execution and now operates a Cinema in Paris. Last but not least, we have a joint British-American plot to eliminate the top Nazi command and win the war with the help of the Basterds.

Moving down from the plot level we get a pure unique Tarantino movie. Long stretches of dialogue ranging from the breezy flirtatious to the equivalent of verbal sparring. Topics of conversation are as mundane as a card game, as obscure as the films of the 1930’s Germany and sometimes very informative (did you know 1930’s era nitrate film is extremely flammable?). The best and most memorable of these long conversations constitutes “chapter 1″ of the film. In it, a Nazi colonel is talking to a French dairy farmer who might be hiding Jews in his small home. The conversation is long, intense and so perfectly setup and performed that it makes for a brilliant short film. I love how much Tarantino’s love of film making shines through his films and this one is no exception. Film, as in film reel, is at the heart of Shosanna’s story and her cinema is the epicenter of the film’s climax. We get references, sometimes subtle sometimes explicit to movies. Some scenes are a homage to similar ones from older films, others seem to call on a particular mood or another. He combines all that and picks and chooses his genres as he pleases, here we get film noir (femme fatale included), a WWII movie, a revenge story, a cartoon and a western of sorts. At no point does it feel forced or artificial, he simply elevates these genres into a an art film all his own. When I saw it for the second time, I took the chance to more adequately appreciate how good his shots are. We get lots of close ups (faces, makeup, feet, food,…), a camera that is very fluid but not dizzying. One particulary memorable shot is of Shosanna in a slinky red dress standing in front of a circular window, slowly dragging on her cigarette with her reflection in the mirror and a Nazi red flag right outside. He uses Bowie’s “Putting Up The Fire” to score this scene. So perfect, so fucking beautiful.

This post has gone on a bit longer than normal, but I cannot stop before mentioning the actors. All did an excellent job (Eli Roth can act pretty well). The best of the bunch was Christoph Waltz, as Hans Landa, the Nazi colonel who terrorizes the farmer in Chapter 1 and who dominates every damn scene he is in. He smooth, funny, sharp and terrifying. If this dude does not get at least an Oscar nod and hopefully an award it would be a terrible injustice. I cannot even see a strudel or a glass of milk without thinking about his threatening smirk.