When I got back from cooking locally sourced vegetarian food for slow food, I made chipotle sliders – the recipe was from some star chef – Bobby Flay, maybe? (yup) – from the People mag I bought in the Denver airport, on the way home from Dallas, because it had Johnny Depp on the cover – devilled eggs, and baked Brie.

I am allowed to think Johnny’s cute, because he looks like my older son.

Johnny & Johnny

I am looking forward to the movie version of Dark Shadows. The original was on afternoon TV when I was in grade school. I liked it but I’m not sure why – no fang, no color, no action. So surely the Depp & Tim Burton version will be even more fun. I somehow missed Rum Diary, it was in and out of the theaters here in Madison pretty quick. But I’ll get it on Netflix or cable, eventually.

And, this time I got back to the room in time to see the last 15 mins. of Public Enemies – that I saw in a theater in Chicago just about a year ago, when it first came out. Just enough time for me to watch Johnny Depp as Dillinger watch a Clark Gable as a gangster, and get shot in the street after. I thought they filmed it at the Chicago Theater on Lake Street, but they used the Biograph up on Lincoln Avenue, which is where the real Dillinger got shot – and evidently a nice upgrade to the Biograph’s facade. Come to think of it, I might’ve seen a play there – Chicago’s Victory Garden Theater company bought it in 2004.

The correct eerie green relish, but ketchup?!! Least it's almost full and the mustard's almost gone

It was too dark to get a good shot of the pizza

It had salami, pasta, garbanzo beans, cheese

WeatherDock on my computer

…. must have been a busy week, since I have not written since last Friday. We’re into the grinding down part of the winter, we had rain and fog, and now it’s really cold, that cheery sun actually indicating that’s it’s clear enough to be cold. And because of the rain, we lost a lot of our pretty snow cover – when I was walking to work this morning I went past a snow drift that’s outside the university bookstore, where the smokers stand. It was a greyish, pockmarked, lump of ice, studded with cigarette butts. Lovely.

Tonight is soup for dinner; stayed up late cooking on both Tuesday – baking breads & bars, cleaning greens, making dressing – and Wednesday, last night – making the soups themselves, and rolls, and the dough for Heidi’s seedy flatbread, that I’ll roll out when I get there, and bake at the last minute, in a really hot oven – warm the place up. I also made some tea/cidar – some cinammon spice tea with a little bit of brown sugar, mixed with cidar. In the summer, I was making tea/juice drinks, like Darjeeling tea with a peach teabag and some peach juice, hibiscus-mint, and so on. Tonight I think I’ll heat the tea/cidar, serve it as hot spice cidar, since it’s so cold out.

Oh, yeah, and when I was done cooking last night and wanted to watch some mindless TV and drink a beer, the wonders of cable provided me with two versions of Johnny Depp as a criminal – George Jung in Blow (John’s easy Halloween costume a few years ago – all it took was a baggie of Wondra and some cheap aviator sunglasses), and Donnie Brasco. I watched Blow, even though I think Donnie’s a far better movie – it had almost and hour and a half to go, and the last 58 minutes of Blow, till midnight, seemed a lot more resonable.

Teeny tiny camera did a good job in Boston, but I forgot to bring it or any other camera for tonight; iPhoneroids are us, I guess.

We went to see the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, that I wanted to see because it’s Terry Gilliam, and Johnny Depp is in it. As anticipated, it looked great, due to the Gilliam influence. Johnny Depp is barely on screen, as one of the three actors playing “Tony” to replace dead Heath Ledger, but while Depp is there, he is beautifully romancing a lady of a certain age. There were also Victorian cardboard pop-up forests, rolling green fields and puffy clouds to make Peter Max swoon, and a tap-dancing troop of British policemen in half-drag, from the waist down – nylons & high heeled shoes below their jackets and hats.

We went for pizza afterward at Porta d’Alba, no doubt the best wood-fired pizza in Madison. I think they must do their crusts the way that my Big Sur Bakery Cookbook instructs – you divide the dough into individual pizza crust size balls, and then rise it overnight on a tray in the fridge – or on a rack of trays in a big walk-in if you have one. Then you stretch it out and bake it per pizza – you can even toss it if you’re feeling especially dexterous. You end up with this great round rim of chewy dough with a pool of pizza inside.

Meanwhile, the Packers came back to tie the game; I started checking on my iPhone when we got to the pizza place, but then lost in overtime. Our bill at the pizza place plus tip equalled the score: $45.51.

And everyone’s saying that this cardinal player grabbed Rodgers’ face mask, causing him to fumble – not an argument I’m gonna get into.

Is he or isn't he?

Cool.

I made fried rice for dinner – looks like I posted my recipe a little over a year ago.

Fried rice at the kitchen counter, Nov. 2008

I made it pretty much the same tonight but with tofu instead of chicken – I bought a package of some kind of Asian seasoned tofu because I thought it’d be nice & chewy. Instead it was soft and cooked liver-like in texture. Don’t think I’ll buy that kind again – it was WestSoy – the company doesn’t even list it on their web site.

Instead of eating my fried rice seated at the kitchen counter with a beer, while reading the New Yorker, I sat on the couch and watched Johnny Depp in Public Enemies. I still enjoyed the beer – a Hopalicious, local microbrew, that I usually find a little bitter, but it was good with the rice. My cats were just as desparate as always to get a taste of the rice, too.

posted from my iPhone