Sunday, May 10, 2026

Netflix of the Day

“Anyone can cook aloo gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham”

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
An old but very amusing film.

“Bend it like Beckham" is to curve a soccer ball around defenders during a free kick, a technique mastered by the famous soccer player David Beckham. The film of this title is about an Indian-British family who live near Heathrow airport. The teenage daughter is a keen and skilled soccer player, to the dismay of her family — who want her to be a proper Indian daughter and either go to school and become a lawyer or get married to someone they choose. Her mother especially wants her to learn to cook aloo-gobi, the traditional British-Indian dish. She’d rather bend it like Beckham.

Her fellow team-mate is played by Kiera Knightly. We saw the movie close to the time it came out (2002) and just watched it again. We expected it to seem out-of-date, but in fact, it’s held up very nicely over the decades! It inspired me to try recipes for aloo gobi, the cauliflower and potato dish that’s in the title. Maybe I’ll make it again soon.

Aloo Gobi that I cooked in 2009.

Anyone can turn blue…

Three Avatar movies from the past and present.

Happy Mother’s Day

Pancake Breakfast

Blueberry Pancakes with powdered sugar and (later) maple syrup.

Saturday, May 09, 2026

Outdoor Art from our Trip to England

Crathes Castle Garden and Sea Birds

This was the final tour on our cruise in the British Isles.

Birds Seen from the Ship

Thus begins the challenge of catching up with all the photos I took during the voyage while I had inadequate internet access to upload them and little time to create blog posts! This is shared with several weekend blogger collections.

Friday, May 08, 2026

Kitchen Scenes

Here, in no particular order, are some of the photos I took when touring two Great Houses along our route in the British Isles last week. The families who own these houses, which also have beautiful formal and less formal gardens, lived there until fairly recently, so the kitchens combine historic display items with slightly older equipment for preparing grand dinners and family meals. Some of these photos were in a post I did last week, but I wanted to include them again.

I’m writing this while watching a version of a Jane Austen novel on TV — I suspect that these kitchens would have been quite similar to the ones in the houses she wrote about, though the characters in the novels weren’t generally in any kitchens. They are definitely similar to the ones in many TV series about the British upper classes and their servants!