Experimental Mondays week 5 (and other things)
Er, OK, so experimental Monday got shifted to Saturday but the reason will become apparent.
I made aubergine, shallot and sun-dried tomato calzone. This involved making pizza dough from scratch and, as this is a yeast dough, it required prooving. There was no way that I could get home from work and have pizza on the table at a sensible time. So I made it on Saturday and we still ate fairly late, but it didn't matter too much. The filling was very good, much better than expected, and I was impressed that the mozzerella was stringy and lovely.
The dough probably needed to be rolled/pushed out thinner but otherwise it was just right. It's something that I definitely plan to experiment with again and the nice thing is that I can make up my own fillings if I don't fancy a totally veggie one. Or I could use the dough and make a flat pizza quite easily. A very good experimnt.
Tonight is a new recipe as well, but not quite an experimental Monday recipe as it's quite easy: pork with black bean sauce. As the sauce is from a jar and it's really just a quick stir-fry, I'm not counting it.
After our pizza, Mum and I settled in to watch Towering Inferno. I still regard this as the best, totally classic disaster movie. It has everything right and modern attempts at the genre are never going to compare. For starters, modern attempts wouldn't allow two heroic stars, they wouldn't let the only devloping-romance plot involve people over 50, and it takes its time to get started which is the opposite of modern movies. By the time the fire gets going, we're nearly an hour into the movie and we've got a whole host of characters and stories to really care about. Steve McQueen, by contrast, doesn't appear on the screen until after the fire is discovered. There is no set-up for him, we know very little about his character apart from the fact that he's a good firefighter and at the end we've learned the important stuff about him but nothing about his personal life.
It's a movie that stands up to repeated re-watchings because I notice something different each time, largely due to the number of different plots and characters. This time I really noticed the relationship between the mayor and his wife, who are both in their fifties and don't follow the modern view of beauty. What I love is how strong their relationship is. The mayor is head over heals in love with his larger, beautiful wife rather than having an affair with some twiggy little young thing. They both worry about how their daughter will cope without them and he does his best to comfort her and remember their long years together. That makes his final fate the more tragic, in a way.
In other thoughts, I'm undecided about whether I'll be watching CSI or Gray's Anatomy this year. I missed both of them last year so there is stuff to catch up on. I suspect that CSI is the easier one to pick without seeing the previous season, but Gray's is stupidly addictive. Oh, the decisions.
I made aubergine, shallot and sun-dried tomato calzone. This involved making pizza dough from scratch and, as this is a yeast dough, it required prooving. There was no way that I could get home from work and have pizza on the table at a sensible time. So I made it on Saturday and we still ate fairly late, but it didn't matter too much. The filling was very good, much better than expected, and I was impressed that the mozzerella was stringy and lovely.
The dough probably needed to be rolled/pushed out thinner but otherwise it was just right. It's something that I definitely plan to experiment with again and the nice thing is that I can make up my own fillings if I don't fancy a totally veggie one. Or I could use the dough and make a flat pizza quite easily. A very good experimnt.
Tonight is a new recipe as well, but not quite an experimental Monday recipe as it's quite easy: pork with black bean sauce. As the sauce is from a jar and it's really just a quick stir-fry, I'm not counting it.
After our pizza, Mum and I settled in to watch Towering Inferno. I still regard this as the best, totally classic disaster movie. It has everything right and modern attempts at the genre are never going to compare. For starters, modern attempts wouldn't allow two heroic stars, they wouldn't let the only devloping-romance plot involve people over 50, and it takes its time to get started which is the opposite of modern movies. By the time the fire gets going, we're nearly an hour into the movie and we've got a whole host of characters and stories to really care about. Steve McQueen, by contrast, doesn't appear on the screen until after the fire is discovered. There is no set-up for him, we know very little about his character apart from the fact that he's a good firefighter and at the end we've learned the important stuff about him but nothing about his personal life.
It's a movie that stands up to repeated re-watchings because I notice something different each time, largely due to the number of different plots and characters. This time I really noticed the relationship between the mayor and his wife, who are both in their fifties and don't follow the modern view of beauty. What I love is how strong their relationship is. The mayor is head over heals in love with his larger, beautiful wife rather than having an affair with some twiggy little young thing. They both worry about how their daughter will cope without them and he does his best to comfort her and remember their long years together. That makes his final fate the more tragic, in a way.
In other thoughts, I'm undecided about whether I'll be watching CSI or Gray's Anatomy this year. I missed both of them last year so there is stuff to catch up on. I suspect that CSI is the easier one to pick without seeing the previous season, but Gray's is stupidly addictive. Oh, the decisions.