Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

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We had potatoes for breakfast again today. Then we went to see Rossini’s Cinderella, staged in 1930s Hollywood – so Cinderella and the ugly stepsisters were trying to parts in a movie. Snacked on some party leftovers, and now it’s time for dessert – maybe trifle, or I still really want rhubarb bars and vanilla ice cream – and game of thrones.

First movie of the day Saturday – 1920s gangsters, but played by kids, so the tommy guns shoot whipped cream and the cars are all pedal cars. Jodie Foster & Scott Baio are the two biggest stars. It’s got a reputation as a great comedy, but there’s something off putting about kids in those roles – do we really want 12 years olds to be so gangsta? Or, really, grow up so fast – they were gangsters but not gangsta back then.

Willem DaFoe as Cisco, and his girlfriend Skye, waiting for the end of the world, that’s coming at 4:44 a.m. on a Wednesday, with all their gadgets running non-stop: Cisco’s giant flat screen TV with Al Gore and various pundits – that’s one of the running jokes – Al was right, it’s environmental catastrophe that’s causing the end – Skye’s iPad with feel good pundits including the Dalai lama; iPhones, laptops, and Skype-ing relatives to say goodbye. They order take out, and the delivery guy borrows their Skype to say goodbye to his parents in Viet Nam, we thought. Mark liked how, over the course of the film, it became clear that ditzy Skye actually was coping with the end better than Cisco – she managed to wear all her favorite dresses and complete her painting by 4:44.

What happens when people working in a fast food chicken sandwich place are all too stupid to question the guy posing as a cop over the phone, and do all the things he tells them to do. Like strip search an employee who supposed stole money from a customer’s purse – WTF?! Really well made film – too bad it was such a paean to stupidity.

More gorgeous young French people, and they had a summer house in the Loire Valley, too. Joelle said, “It was so normal – that’s how it always goes”. First true love never works out. I liked one of the songs, Johnny Flynn & Laura Marling’s duet on one of his songs, The Water. Got it in my iTunes now.

I guess this one was adapted from a play from the 1950s – that I am not familiar with – by Terrence Rattigan. The movie remake was in honor of Rattigan’s 100th birthday, that was June 10, 2011. It had that feel of being of another time. About how men are broken by war and hopeless unrequited love. L’amour fou – is it prettier in French? And English people singing old songs in the pub and in the Underground during the blitz.

I got a little too drowsy during this one – it was pretty slow moving – a woman in her 60s who engineers her rich husband’s will so that she and her n’er do well children inherit – but her children are so unprepossessing, you can understand her giving them the cash, but it’s hard to understand why she lets them move into the fancy house with her at the end.

The first film of the Fest for us, about an Algerian refugee who has washed up in Quebec. He takes over as the teacher for a class at an elementary school – their teacher committed suicide by hanging herself in the classroom, where one of the kids found her. All the kids in the class really need a hug, but because this is the 21st century, none of the teachers is allowed to give them one.

Extremely arty – directed by Guy Maddin, who I did not know much about, but he seems quite popular among film aficionados. To me, the film was like a moving, b&w version of the artists’ haunted house at my house last fall – people dressed in vintage clothes, moving about in vintage interiors, and saying short meaningful phrases to each other, like “I remember”, and “Quick, lay her down she’s filling up” – about the drowned girl who was nonetheless walking around. With Jason Patric and Isabella Rosellini.

Girls & boys in striped shirts and skinny jeans. Scenes of Paris in the late 1960s (1970s, really) intercut with environmental pollution – dirty water spewing out of pipes and trees being felled. All with the soft look and colors of Kodachrome – like when people scan their childhood photos to post on Facebook. Mark liked that all the skinny girls had normal-size breasts.

Mostly everyone’s favorite so far – the story of Dom, a night clerk at a little hotel in Le Havre, who meets a fairy named Fiona who grants him 3 wishes. Lots of physical humor, like Dom & Fiona on a scooter chasing a car with their baby on a cushion sliding around on top of the trunk. There’re also a couple of great dance scenes, one underwater and one on a rooftop.

Crooked cops and drug dealers chasing each other through a disco. In French which made it more interesting – I liked how the cop who polices other cops was flic des flics instead of maybe IAD – internal affairs division – as we’d say. We had to sit in the front row, though, and my neck really hurt by the end.

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Pacquin) at 20 playing 17, an upper west side exclusive private school girl who probably causes an accident by running alongside a bus, talking to the driver, distracting him, so he runs a redlight and kills a woman crossing the street with her groceries. It’s directed by Kenneth Lonnergan, who also directed You can count on me – and Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick are in both movies. J. Smith-Cameron, who’s also been a character in True Blood (Sam Merlotte’s white trash shape shifter mom) plays Anna’s mom who’s an actress, in lots of small plays in NYC. There’s a funny scene where the mom is talking about how she’d briefly been on a TV show and it just paid the bills – foreshadowing that she & Anna would both be on True Blood a few years later.

Posted from my iPhone, at least partly

This morning I took some potatoes that looked like this:

Sprouty, alien invader potatoes

And made them look like this:

Saved potatoes, roasted

And then we ate them with this:

Scrambled eggs with asparagus

Quite satisfying, really. Al did ask if I’d bought like 45 pounds of asparagus, because “you’ve been putting it in everything, mom”. He’s right – we had shrimp & asparagus pasta last Sunday, asparagus pizza on Friday, and eggs with asparagus today.  But I didn’t buy like 45 pounds of asparagus; Molly & David brought us like 45 pounds of asparagus as a hostess gift on Passover.

And, mmm, at about 3:30, I ate the last two pieces of potato, room temp, with the last little hunk of bacon – the potatoes had gotten this lovely flour-y texture on the insides, almost creamy.

Like I said, it got cold again here in WI. The last two evenings, I’ve had online meetings with one of my library school classes. My students are giving short presentations on new technology, and we all meet using web conferencing to hear them. Six students presented in an hour and a half on Tuesday; we got through 8 last night in about 2 1/2 hours. There’s another session tonight, and then two more next week. I’ve been logging in from home, and managing to get some kind of dinner dish into the oven beforehand.

Tuesday I came home a little early, because we wanted to take Al’s 10-speed to the bike shop for a tune up. Which we did, only to find out that it’s junk – he was in a two bike accident, and the frame got bent – he got a concussion. The bike shop didn’t even want it for their red bike program, where they take old bikes, paint them red, and leave them around town for people to pick up and use for free. So we came home, stuck it in the back of the garage, and I quickly layered up the Splendid Table tortilla casserole I’d been wanting to make. Stuck it in the oven, everyone else ate while I was web conferencing, and I had my slice while watching season 2, episode 3, Downton Abbey on DVD.

Last night I got home in time to make a chicken rice pilaf – cooked a chopped onion in butter & olive oil in one of my heavy Le Creuset Dutch ovens, added the chopped up meat from the 3 chicken thighs I had roasted on Passover – to have chicken thigh for the shank bone on the Seder plate – then put in 2 cups of short grain brown rice, and the last of the cleaned spinach – also chopped – about 3/4 of a bunch. Poured in the quart jar of turkey broth I had strained off the matzoh balls (and a little water – I had always heard that you need to add a little water when cooking rice in home made broth – it’s so gelatinous that the rice needs a little help to absorb it – and this broth was really gelled in the jar). Brought the whole mess to a boil, put the lid on, and stuck it in the 350°. Al got home from the gym an hour later and reported it was looking rice-y, not soupy, so I declared it done and he dug in. Between then and 8:30, when I took my portion, the 6 of us in the house ate it all. Even Rach, who’s on a no processed grains, no dairy, no sugar, regime right now would’ve been able to eat it, if we had left any.

So, pretty good for using up Passover leftovers, although today, trash day, I still threw out more stuff than I like to – I hate throwing away food – but I just didn’t know what to do with the last two matzoh balls, the dried out farfel stuffing, and the greasy purple onions that had flavored the brisket – so I binned it all, as the Brits would say. At least there were still pretty blossoms to look at when I went to walk, to make me feel better about throwing away all that stuff, not to mention the satisfaction of the neat & tidy looking, cleaned out refrigerator.

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