my heart is full of the pain of disco [a night in India]
David and I visited India this past weekend. it was a bit longer visit than we had planned. originally it was going to be a one-night thing, but things often don't go precisely as planned.
the menu was pork vindaloo and vegetarian samosas.
which of course means we had to get a few ingredients. there's an Indian restaurant with attached market in CR, where we went first and got most everything we needed [including a box mix for falafel], except for the vindaloo paste. we went to several places, no luck, so finally I had David look up a recipe for it, and bought those ingredients instead.
we now have a fairly large bag of red chiles in the fridge, which I'm not really sure what to do with. I suppose I could dry them...
anyhow, I ended up running around on errands quite a lot longer than anticipated on Saturday, so got home in the mid-afternoon. we had to clean up the kitchen before we could consider cooking, and I started with the vindaloo paste. then David joined me to assist with dinner prep, and he started working on the samosas. the end of the story is that I re-read the vindaloo recipe, and saw "marinate meat for 24 hours." that sort of scrapped the idea for dinner that night. so we ended up making burgers.
Sunday was busy. church in the morning, we took Randy to Colette's mid-afternoon, and then volunteered at QCGA that night. no Indian cooking.
which brings us to Monday. David got home from work, and we started up on making dinner. while we cooked, we listened to the warm-up entertainment - an episode of Red Dwarf wherein Lister is turned into a 6" super soldier in order to fight the mutton vindaloo beast that they had accidentally created. [the name of the episode is D.N.A., in case you're curious, and it's pretty amusing.] of course we chose that episode because of the vindaloo beast. lager's the only thing that'll kill a vindaloo.
we ended up with quite a number of samosas. David cooked them up while the vindaloo simmered. he only cooked 6. we have another dozen in the freezer now. and they're very tasty. the vindaloo kind of came back to kick your tongue with fire, a little bit. not terribly, though. we had reduced the amount of fire in the ingredients considerably. David also purchased a couple bottles of juice drink from the Indian market, so we tried one of those. I have no idea what juice it is, and I didn't care for it. we have another bottle to try with the leftovers.
we have a lot of leftovers.
to top off our trip to India, then, I hit upon the idea of watching a Bollywood movie. I've never seen one before. a quick search of the library catalog under keyword "bollywood" turned up a couple options, including Om Shanti Om, a title that seemed... familiar to me. and then it dawned on me, after doing a little more looking, that this was a recent film starring Shahrukh Kahn, a Bollywood actor with whom I am familiar because of gaming. so that was perfect, and a visit to the library in Hiawatha was included in my errands on Saturday.
unfortunately, the movie is also 162 minutes long. this would have been fine on Saturday night, when we had planned to visit India, but on a Monday night after cooking, it led to a fairly late evening. but we watched it all the way through, even so. it was fun. the thing about this particular film, though, is that it is also a tribute piece. which means that I think David and I missed a lot more in this movie than if we had chosen a regular run-of-the-mill Bollywood movie.
after years of watching anime, I have a pretty good handle on a fair number of cultural references and idiosyncracies of the genre. I'm no expert, by any means, but I'm a knowledgable viewer. with Bollywood, though, we're clueless. the movie starts out in the swingin' 70's, apparently a high point in Bollywood. and I suspect they were quoting movies left and right, but of course we didn't catch any except the most obvious. Gone with the Wind was quoted near the end.
in the "present day" time frame, after the movie fast forwards, there's an awards ceremony wherein Om Kapoor [SRK's character] receives an award. according to the wikipedia article, "More than 42 well-known Bollywood stars appear in the course of the film, including 30 of them (not including the stars of the film) in one song alone." The song to which they refer was the one during the after-award-ceremony party. eventually, something happens, but seriously, this song/dance sequence goes on for just under 10 minutes first, before the villian appears.
10 minutes! after the first song/dance sequence, I told David, now we know why the movie is 162 minutes long!
if anyone remembers The Player from years ago, this movie kind of had that same feel. not in the storyline or ambiance, but in the who's-who in-joke thing. if we had been familiar with the actors making cameos all over the place, we would have caught a few more in-jokes. also similar to anime, there was that curious thing where words and lines in English would pop out randomly. still, it was a very fun movie.
two final notes: my heart is full of the pain of disco is a line from one of the songs. also, I will also begin using fish in place of f*ck, because it's funnier.
the menu was pork vindaloo and vegetarian samosas.
which of course means we had to get a few ingredients. there's an Indian restaurant with attached market in CR, where we went first and got most everything we needed [including a box mix for falafel], except for the vindaloo paste. we went to several places, no luck, so finally I had David look up a recipe for it, and bought those ingredients instead.
we now have a fairly large bag of red chiles in the fridge, which I'm not really sure what to do with. I suppose I could dry them...
anyhow, I ended up running around on errands quite a lot longer than anticipated on Saturday, so got home in the mid-afternoon. we had to clean up the kitchen before we could consider cooking, and I started with the vindaloo paste. then David joined me to assist with dinner prep, and he started working on the samosas. the end of the story is that I re-read the vindaloo recipe, and saw "marinate meat for 24 hours." that sort of scrapped the idea for dinner that night. so we ended up making burgers.
Sunday was busy. church in the morning, we took Randy to Colette's mid-afternoon, and then volunteered at QCGA that night. no Indian cooking.
which brings us to Monday. David got home from work, and we started up on making dinner. while we cooked, we listened to the warm-up entertainment - an episode of Red Dwarf wherein Lister is turned into a 6" super soldier in order to fight the mutton vindaloo beast that they had accidentally created. [the name of the episode is D.N.A., in case you're curious, and it's pretty amusing.] of course we chose that episode because of the vindaloo beast. lager's the only thing that'll kill a vindaloo.
we ended up with quite a number of samosas. David cooked them up while the vindaloo simmered. he only cooked 6. we have another dozen in the freezer now. and they're very tasty. the vindaloo kind of came back to kick your tongue with fire, a little bit. not terribly, though. we had reduced the amount of fire in the ingredients considerably. David also purchased a couple bottles of juice drink from the Indian market, so we tried one of those. I have no idea what juice it is, and I didn't care for it. we have another bottle to try with the leftovers.
we have a lot of leftovers.
to top off our trip to India, then, I hit upon the idea of watching a Bollywood movie. I've never seen one before. a quick search of the library catalog under keyword "bollywood" turned up a couple options, including Om Shanti Om, a title that seemed... familiar to me. and then it dawned on me, after doing a little more looking, that this was a recent film starring Shahrukh Kahn, a Bollywood actor with whom I am familiar because of gaming. so that was perfect, and a visit to the library in Hiawatha was included in my errands on Saturday.
unfortunately, the movie is also 162 minutes long. this would have been fine on Saturday night, when we had planned to visit India, but on a Monday night after cooking, it led to a fairly late evening. but we watched it all the way through, even so. it was fun. the thing about this particular film, though, is that it is also a tribute piece. which means that I think David and I missed a lot more in this movie than if we had chosen a regular run-of-the-mill Bollywood movie.
after years of watching anime, I have a pretty good handle on a fair number of cultural references and idiosyncracies of the genre. I'm no expert, by any means, but I'm a knowledgable viewer. with Bollywood, though, we're clueless. the movie starts out in the swingin' 70's, apparently a high point in Bollywood. and I suspect they were quoting movies left and right, but of course we didn't catch any except the most obvious. Gone with the Wind was quoted near the end.
in the "present day" time frame, after the movie fast forwards, there's an awards ceremony wherein Om Kapoor [SRK's character] receives an award. according to the wikipedia article, "More than 42 well-known Bollywood stars appear in the course of the film, including 30 of them (not including the stars of the film) in one song alone." The song to which they refer was the one during the after-award-ceremony party. eventually, something happens, but seriously, this song/dance sequence goes on for just under 10 minutes first, before the villian appears.
10 minutes! after the first song/dance sequence, I told David, now we know why the movie is 162 minutes long!
if anyone remembers The Player from years ago, this movie kind of had that same feel. not in the storyline or ambiance, but in the who's-who in-joke thing. if we had been familiar with the actors making cameos all over the place, we would have caught a few more in-jokes. also similar to anime, there was that curious thing where words and lines in English would pop out randomly. still, it was a very fun movie.
two final notes: my heart is full of the pain of disco is a line from one of the songs. also, I will also begin using fish in place of f*ck, because it's funnier.