British Baking Show Wrap Up (Contains Spoilers)

Competing.
(These and all images in this post are screen shots I made during the show.)

This morning we watched the finale of the current Great British Baking Show. We have faithfully watched all the other episodes from this year— as well as having watched most episodes during previous years. There wasn’t much suspense this time as one and only one contestant has won almost every week.

One of many very richly decorated and filled cakes.

Judging

With all the friends, family, and other contestants — about to announce the winner.

 

A Miyazaki Film and some nice drinks

 

Yes it is a yellowjacket on my donut.

We like to go to the cider mill every autumn and have cider and donuts.

“The Boy and the Heron”

Finally, this long-awaited movie is on streaming.

We have watched this newly released film on streaming, and I’m sad to say, we didn’t find it as charming or captivating as our favorite Miyazaki films such as “Totoro,” “Spirited Away,” “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”

The Japanese title is taken from a classic book written in 1937 and
 loved by Japanese youth.

I read the Japanese book How Do You Live last year, when I was first hearing about this new Miyazaki film. Like many reviewers, when I watched, I found the connection between them to be somewhat difficult to grasp, as the plot, setting and characters are all different. I reviewed this book in detail here:

How Do You Live?

Quite a few scenes include someone making tea served with bread & butter.

Miyazaki’s films often feature a “Granny” — in this one there are quite a few grannies who crave
food and cigarettes (since it’s set during the war when shortages were severe).

KAOS

Zeus drinks beer while barbecuing.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander.

Movie images from IMDB.

Shared with Elizabeth’s Tuesday party.

Miss Marple Carries Her Purse (I mean Handbag)

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in the BBC series from 1987.
I love the way she carries her handbag! 
Corrected because it’s been pointed out to me that in England it’s a handbag, not a purse.

Joan Hickson (1906-1998) is my favorite portrayer of Miss Marple, the seemingly invisible old lady in Agatha Christie’s detective novels who always figures out who committed the crime, how they did it, and why. Joan Hickson’s acting suggests that Miss Marple was dotty and did not know what was going on — but meanwhile she was observing everyone and figuring out their motives and methods. The character’s sharp grasp of human nature was developed by watching the people in her little town, Saint Mary Mead, where she classified her fellow inhabitants by their type, and applied these observations in her successful career as a clandestine detective.

“At Bertram’s Hotel,” based on the 1965 novel.

“At Bertram’s Hotel” takes place at a hotel in London, beginning as Miss Marple and several other people are checking in at the counter in the beautifully retro hotel lobby, full of comfortable leather arm chairs, a fire burning in a fireplace, and lots of uniformed servants. Guests are constantly having tea with wonderful traditional sweets like “seed cake” — a dryish caraway-flavored cake whose popularity dates to the 18th century (source).

Miss Marple mentions that as a child she had once stayed at Bertram’s with her aunt — and that nothing has changed there since that moment. Watching this drama, you are thus aware of at least three eras in the past: the 1980s when the series was filmed, the 1960s when the action takes place, and perhaps the pre-World-War-I era when Miss Marple remembers her first visit there. Very amusing!

Ultimately, Miss Marple realizes that the retro atmosphere is faked, like a magician’s misdirection, concealing a deep criminal plot, and also becoming the scene of a crime of passion. She helps two police detectives to bring the criminal gang to justice, and solves the other mystery as well, ending with the statement:

“I learned what I suppose I really knew already — that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back—that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn’t it?”

This week we also watched two other dramatizations of Miss Marple novels, both with Joan Hickson.

I also read one volume of an Elly Griffiths series,
The Vanishing Box It’s not as good as her Ruth Galloway books.

It’s definitely been a week of mysteries!

Winter is back. Poor daffodils!

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

 

In My Life

Reading and Watching

Environmentally and socially responsible collection.

Quotes from The Best American Food Writing 2023

From the introduction by editor Mark Bittman:

"It could have happened sooner, but for decades food writers were actively discouraged from thinking about food as anything other than pleasurable. Those late-twentieth-century food writers could produce all they wanted about continental luxury hotels and their restaurants, about authenticity in Mongolia, about potatoes in Peru, about the mysterious ways of Japan, about the availability of sea urchin by mail, or how a home cook could produce deer—or tofu!—jerky, and so on, but they were for the most part forbidden from treading on the fields of sustainability, environmental pollution (food writers decidedly did not cover Rachel Carson), the decline of nutrition, the horrors of processing or labor: Leave those more serious and less-enchanting and -delightful subjects to your colleagues in Business or Health or Agriculture." (The Best American Food Writing 2023, p. xxi).

From "What Counts as Fresh Food?" by Bee Wilson: 

"The great miracle of our modern food system has been to supply us with the freshness of spring all year round—or at least with an approximation of it. ... Our entire food supply is based on the idea of 'fresh' and 'keeping things fresh.' But to keep things fresh is a kind of contradiction or deception, because something can only be truly fresh when it is right out of the ground or just cooked. (p. 19-20)

From "What We Write About When We Write About Food" by Ligaya Mishan: 

"Still, when contemporary food writers (and, I suppose, I am one) stray from celebrating flavors to probe the larger issues surrounding the parade of dishes to our tables—exploitation of labor, abuse of animals, climate change, the homogenizing of cuisines and cultures under globalization, systemic injustices that allow millions of people to go hungry each year—some readers complain. Food should not be political, they insist. Food is universal; food unites us. Let us have our cake in peace." (p. 132). 

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo: new translation.

This is a highly regarded book published in 1955. It's always been obscure, never a blockbuster but literary critics seem to love it as did Gabriel García Márquez. It's all about dead people who are still very active and present in a strange little town. But it's not a ghost story, it's maybe an early example of magical realism. The narrator is on a quest to a town that "sits on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell. They say many of those who die there and go to Hell come back to fetch their blankets." (p. 15). 

For example, a man's wife dies one evening, and in the morning he goes to buy some strong drink; the drink seller offers him two for the price of one on the condition: "But tell your dead wife I always liked her and ask her to keep me in mind when she gets to Heaven. ... Tell her before she gets all cold." (p. 129). 

A review last week in the New York Times by Valeria Luiselli, "A Masterpiece That Inspired Gabriel García Márquez to Write His Own" pushed me to buy and read this obscure tale; summarizing its influence thus:

"Jorge Luis Borges said it was one of the greatest works of literature ever written. Susan Sontag called it one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. Enrique Vila-Matas has said that it is the 'perfect novel.' Roberto Bolaño’s '2666' would probably not exist without it. The book shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way 'The Waste Land' or 'Ulysses' does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter."

Just one thing: as I read, I appreciated the numerous brief mentions of birds. These lighten the very dark mood of a town of the dead. Examples —"A roadrunner, señor. That’s what they call those birds." (p. 16) ... "I’d seen the still air shattered by doves flapping their wings as if they were breaking free of the day." (p. 17)  ... "I wish I were a vulture so I could fly to where my sister lives." (p. 28)... "Through the hole in the roof, I watched flocks of thrushes pass overhead, those birds that flutter about in the late afternoon just before darkness closes the roads." (p. 62) ... "Returning from its flight around the fields, the mockingbird crossed in front of him and let out an anguished howl." (p. 71) ... "There weren’t any seagulls, only those birds they call 'ugly beaks,' the ones that growl as if they were snoring and then disappear when the sun comes out." (p. 105). 

Count me as clueless. But I did finish reading it. 

Streaming ... 

"Lessons in Chemistry" on Apple TV.
Very good series!

Final episode of Great British Baking Show (no photo of finalists -- no spoilers).
Some review I read said this season was like watching bread rise.
Yes, but it's so soothing!

Time to think about annual donations

...

From the Washington Post

A little color at a grey time of year

Morning sky as we occasionally see it in winter. Mostly we see only grey clouds. No auroras yet.

 Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Media: Watching and Reading

Death Comes to Pemberley

Though usually not a fan of twenty-first century sequels to Jane Austen's books, I enjoyed reading P.D.James' Death Comes to Pemberley.  This novel is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, and takes place at the stately home of the wealthy Darcy family, now headed by Austen's characters Darcy and Elizabeth, nee Bennet.  Death Comes to Pemberley was published in 2011, and made into a BBC series in 2013. We have now (finally) watched the miniseries and enjoyed it very much. 

The TV series is full of wonderful scenes with fine horse-drawn carriages and Georgian elegance.

The Bennett family from Pride and Prejudice continue to be quirky and amusing: Elizabeth, sensitive and responsible; Mrs. Bennet, self-centered and hypochondriacal; Lydia Bennet, a self-absorbed adolescent (even though she has reached her twenties by the time of this sequel); and also Darcy, still arrogant because of his money and social status. As the matron of a huge establishment with a large staff of servants, Elizabeth Bennet shows her calm and confident maturity.

At the beginning, Pemberley is buzzing with preparations for a ball, including incredible food scenes.
Here, Elizabeth is reviewing the food in the kitchen.

The servants are all ready and at attention as their work is reviewed.

Unlike in any actual Jane Austen novel, Death Comes to Pemberley soon sees a major act of violence with a murder in the dark woods in the middle of the night. While the original novels are domestic stories, mostly of young women who must make their way in a highly challenging social world, P.D.James' novel is a mystery full of action and impending danger, especially to the irresponsible and unlikeable rogue Wickham, husband of Lydia Bennet. 

I especially enjoyed the post-marriage portrait of Darcy. Although as I said, he’s still arrogant, he continues to love Elizabeth and in a way to obey her. I think the Austen character — who obviously would have embodied the values of his era — wouldn’t have been quite so easily managed. In the Washington Post, there’s a review of a new book that analyses the character of Darcy and his limitations, and also how the character influences modern ideals of boyfriends. (See this review)

While Austen almost never refers to the current events of her time, particularly the Napoleonic was and the earlier French Revolution, the characters in Death Comes to Pemberley are both aware and involved in these historic times. In both the novel and in the TV version, I enjoyed the drama and the re-imagined characters. I found both versions very true to the original novel while now in a totally new type of plot.

Not surprisingly, the costumes are also wonderful.

Land of Milk and Honey, A Foodie Dystopia

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang takes place after a global disaster has destroyed all wild and domestic animals, all crops and wild plants, and all possibility of restoring them. Or so it seems. What's left of humanity has only artificial, bioengineered food which tastes terrible. The narrator of this miserable post-apocalypse is a trained chef, and she finds a job in a restaurant at a secret location where the rarest delicacies have been preserved:

"Despite its vast store of ingredients, my employer’s restaurant defaulted, like others in that age, to familiar symbols of prestige. French classics with lots of cream, lots of butter, expensive ingredients, just money glopped on the plate. Money." (p. 19). 

High in the Italian Alps, the destroying smog that's killed everything but humans is mysteriously absent,  creating an end-times garden of Eden with underground storehouses full of heirloom produce and preserved game and domestic animals. This retreat belongs to an obscenely wealthy man, who is enjoying his private stash of gourmandise. He hires the narrator to be his chef for a restaurant where he woos investors in some secretive project to make him even wealthier and more powerful. 

Once this post-apocalypse scenario is set up, there's a plot, but it's kind of secondary to the food and wine descriptions, which read like a very exaggerated version of the old Gourmet magazine in its glory days. Like this: "To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry." (p. 99).

Before the evil smog descended on mankind and on everything that grows, the narrator grew up in Los Angeles. As an adolescent, she defied her immigrant mother and trained to be a chef, but prior to that, she didn't live in a food paradise either. The predecessor of her gourmet life:

"Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac ’n’ cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named—no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain." (p. 154).

After the set-up of the catastrophic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it and the secret stash of real food, the demands on the narrator's culinary skills get kind of weird with a lot of demand for cooking exotic animals that have been reconstructed through some kind of DNA science. She even is forced to prepare a meal of wooly mammoth which is disgusting, and other meat that's even more disgusting. 

A complex plot involving the employer and his young daughter seems to me to be kind of an afterthought to enable a wide variety of food descriptions. Maybe, I sometimes thought while reading, the author really just wanted to set up this imagined human fate. So I won't bother to describe it or the too-pat ending.

News

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time reading international, national, and local news and commentary. So much is going on in the world around me. A few of my obsessions: 

• Primarily, I'm following the news of the war in Israel, which changes every hour, and I keep hoping that somehow either diplomacy or battle will free the kidnapped hostages. Then maybe negotiations can take place. Unfortunately I've read all too many explanations of how Hamas wants a war that will keep them in power, not a peace that will replace them with more responsible government of their people. I fear the stated goal of Hamas: "a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them." (source)
• The controversies about this war are dividing our country, as illustrated by the censure vote of the Palestinian representative in the US Congress. Her endorsement of extremist views of the war (especially quoting a slogan that has always signified a wish for the destruction of Israel and expulsion of all its Jewish citizens) is the most exaggerated example of divisions in our society. The outbreak of antisemitic rhetoric and even violence on college campuses is also very concerning.
• Tuesday's elections in various states, especially Ohio and Virginia, were very important. I'm glad that the voters expressed such strong support for women's rights to control their own bodies. 
• The many court cases against Trump are interesting and at the same time horrifying: how could we have put such a criminal in charge of our government, and how can it be possible that he might return to power and take revenge on all of us? 
• I was also interested in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency flim-flam man, and the revelation of how he spun such a con on people who should have known better. Unfortunately, putting him in jail for decades won't stop the next con man from preying on the same willing victims.

I guess I'm just a news junkie these days!

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Photos from screen shots and BBC publicity.

Chinese Restaurants Everywhere

 

Chinese restaurants serve more or less adapted meals to people in amazing places throughout the world. In a recently published book titled Have You Eaten Yet? Cheuk Kwan, an author and TV presenter, described quite a few of them. Kwan’s memoir describes his journey to many out-of-the-way places in the course of making a documentary series on Chinese food for Canadian television. I’ve found that the original TV shows are available on Youtube; I will watch some soon, I hope. 

Although the travel and research for the TV series that forms the basis for the book took place 20 years ago, this memoir was written in 2021 and just published in Canada in 2022 and in the US in 2023. I really don’t understand why it took around two decades for the author to write a book based on such old information: it seems to have no recent observations or experiences in it, which makes it a bit disappointing and frustrating to read. So much must have happened since then!

Where are the Chinese Restaurants?

Havana, Cuba; Tamatave, Madagascar; Istanbul, Turkey; Darjeeling, India; São Paulo and Manaus, Brazil, inside the Arctic circle in Tromsø, Norway; Haifa, Israel; and a number of other locations — each place Kwan visited had distinctive Chinese restaurants whose owners shared their fascinating personal and family histories, sometimes for several generations. 

“Have you eaten yet” is the way Chinese people often say “How are you?” — perhaps reflecting a past where food wasn’t abundant, and perhaps just reflecting the shared value of a well-prepared meal. Despite the enormous and varied population of China and the unimaginable extent and long history of the Chinese diaspora, Kwan makes us see how many characteristics remain in common throughout this very large part of the human race. He also makes clear that although his focus is on restaurant people, there are many many other Chinese professionals throughout the world as well.

The book is full of fascinating details about the restaurant owners and workers, and about the many ways they have invented Chinese food to please customers wherever their restaurants may be. While the adaptations are fascinating, I was also interested in the numerous times that the author says the food is fully authentic and equal in quality to that in the most renowned restaurants in Hong Kong. Although the author clearly knows that there are many cuisines practiced by the billion people in China, and many adaptations and inventions of Chinese food in restaurants worldwide, he does a good job of showing its unity in the many restaurants he visited and the many people he interviewed. 

So much to learn! I was fascinated by the many places (on several continents and islands) where Chinese chefs specialized in fish from the local waters, creating traditional Chinese fish dishes with local spices. I had no idea that a Chinese community had lived in Cuba since 1857. I learned that China had a very long cultural influence on the east coast of Africa, with trade routes for Chinese ships established around the first century BCE, and a visit from a fleet in around 1418. I was interested to hear about fusion dishes combining Chinese and Indian food, Chinese and Peruvian food, and a few others. But as I say, I wish there had been some updates for the last 20 years, especially about the major changes that have occurred recently in Hong Kong, the author’s reference city for the best of Chinese cuisine.

And Here at Home —

Of course reading this book made me want Chinese food from our currently-favorite local restaurant, Bao Space, which opened earlier this year. Bao, a type of delicious filled and steamed buns, are the star of their menu. The owners, Jessie Zhu, the main chef, and her husband, Raphael Zhu, came to Ann Arbor from Shanghai. Their roots are in Northern China, where they say bao originally came from. 

I’ve posted about Bao Space a few times, but here’s a bit more…

 This is the Bao Space kitchen, which is visible from the window where orders are placed.

Dough for the bao buns is freshly made with flour, yeast, and milk.

Our order: bao buns, sesame-noodle-cucumber salad, and two cups of lemonade.
The menu is simple: just bao, dumplings, a few soups & noodle bowls, and soft drinks.

One bao filled with pork. Other fillings include chicken, beef, and several vegetarian options.

Review and photos © 2023 mae sander

Shared with The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

What’s Streaming on my TV

“Vienna Blood” Season 3

Dr. Max Liebermann, a Freudian analyst and amateur detective in a wonderful series.

The era is Vienna in the first decade of the 20th century, with fabulous costumes and sets.
We have watched all six episodes, which were released recently.

Max and his former fiancée Clara Weiss often have coffee at Viennese cafes.
She has become a newspaper reporter, and wants to know about the cases he is solving.

“Troubled Blood” — Latest Cormoran Strike Series

We have watched the first two episodes, and will watch the rest when available.
Although I have read the book, I don’t remember how it came out so I’m really liking it.

I'm enjoying a quiet week after a very busy trip to Baja California! I have almost caught up with reading the newspapers and magazines and blogs that I follow online, and I have almost managed to start reading again, but not much. I'm sharing this with The Sunday Salon at the blog Readerbuzz.

“Lessons in Chemistry”

“While all the other children gummed their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Madeline opened her lunch box to find a thick slice of leftover lasagna, a side helping of buttery zucchini, an exotic kiwi cut into quarters, five pearly round cherry tomatoes, a tiny Morton salt shaker, two still-warm chocolate chip cookies, and a red plaid thermos full of ice-cold milk.” (p. 3)

This is the lunch that Madeline’s mother, Elizabeth Zott, packed for her. It was “back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought.” So begins Lessons in Chemistry, a novel by Bonnie Garmus. 

Wait a minute, I thought when I read about this lunch. Kiwis and cherry tomatoes weren’t readily available even at specialty food markets until some time much later than 1961. (I looked it up. Kiwis were exotic and rare, and the hybridization of marketable cherry tomatoes didn’t happen until the 70s and 80s.)

Is this another work of seemingly historic fiction where the author doesn’t think the reader cares about accurate details, especially about food? The more I read, the more I thought that this book is a kind of elaborate joke about the sixties, so it indulges in many anachronisms for effect. Maybe. Sometimes, it is conscious of changing times, including details like this: “… he always did his running outside in tennis shoes. This made him an early jogger, meaning that he jogged long before jogging was popular, long before it was even called jogging.” (p. 59)

The fundamental subject of Lessons in Chemistry is the abuse and exclusion of women, ordinary women, from the important features of modern life.  Women were not allowed generally to participate in intellectual and professional activities in the post-World-War-II era — a point made over and over in the life and experience of Elizabeth Zott. Women acquired an identity and a living only through their husbands; an unmarried woman like Elizabeth was reviled or abused, especially if like Elizabeth she had dared to give birth to a child and raise her on her own. Including Elizabeth, women in the novel as in history, resented this: what they were after was “Being taken seriously.” 

Similar analysis of women's fate has been around since the sixties at least, and you could take it back to Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1700s. The events of Lessons in Chemistry occurred just before the publication of the famous book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which took the marginalization of women very seriously, along with other social problems of the era. Garmus, it seems to me, is serious about these same issues, but her book makes the point in a very humorous way, with a variety of exaggerations for effect. For example, the main character, Elizabeth, makes her daughter Madeline into a prodigy — a nearly unbelievable one, in order to highlight the deficits of education and the assumptions of how mothers (not fathers) would be involved.

“Elizabeth had not only taught Madeline to read but to read highly complex things: newspapers, novels, Popular Mechanics.” (p. 234) It’s mentioned that at age 5 this remarkable child was reading Zane Grey, Faulkner, Dickens, Darwin’s Origin of species, and more. Madeline constantly astounds — or annoys — the school librarian with her requests with her exceptionalism, caused by her mother’s refusal to be average.

Six-Thirty, Elizabeth’s dog, has some remarkable characteristics, which also highlight some of the novel’s points about human oddities. Six-Thirty can read the minds of humans. He has a great deal of self-awareness, and a vocabulary that keeps growing. At last count he somehow knew over 900 English words, though he did not speak and we don’t know just what his word knowledge means. There are lots of interesting things about the dog such as that he finds “fetch” to be boring but he indulges humans who want to play with him. All for humorous effect.

The core of the novel is the character Elizabeth Zott’s TV show, where she talks about her real profession, chemistry, and applies it to cooking. In giving kitchen advice to housewives, she encourages them to think, to strive, and to respect and cherish education. And above all, to take themselves seriously!

In fact, the author really plays with us. Here’s a sample when Elizabeth’s boss agrees for her show to have a canned soup manufacturer as a sponsor. What does she do?

“Hello, viewers,” Elizabeth said three hours later. “And welcome back. See this?” She held a soup can close to the camera. “It’s a real time-saver.” From his producer’s chair, Walter gasped in gratitude. She was using the soup! “That’s because it’s full of artificial ingredients,” she said, tossing it with a clunk into a nearby garbage can. “Feed enough of it to your loved ones and they’ll eventually die off, saving you tons of time since you won’t have to feed them anymore.” …

“Luckily, there are much faster ways to kill off your loved ones,” she continued, walking to her easel, where a selection of mushroom drawings was on display, “and mushrooms are an excellent place to start. If it were me, I’d opt for the Amanita phalloides,” she said, tapping one of the drawings, “also known as the death cap mushroom. Not only does its poison withstand high heat, making it a go-to ingredient for a benign-looking casserole, but it very much resembles its nontoxic cousin, the straw mushroom. So if someone dies and there’s an inquiry, you can easily play the dumb housewife and plead mistaken mushroom identity.” (p. 268)

Discrimination against women had an even uglier side in the novel as in real life. A scene that's central to the theme of the book involves a heated interchange between Elizabeth and Miss Frask, a former secretary who had been gleefully instrumental in depriving her of a research position.

Elizabeth says: 

“I’m a chemist. Not a woman chemist. A chemist. A damn good one!” 

“Well, I’m a personnel expert! An almost-psychologist,” Frask shouted. 

“Almost-psychologist?” 

“Shut up.” 

“No really,” Zott said. 

“Almost?” 

“I didn’t have a chance to finish, okay? What about you? Why aren’t you a PhD, Zott?” Frask shot back.

Elizabeth hardened, and without meaning to, revealed a fact about herself that she’d never told anyone other than a police officer. "Because I was sexually violated by my thesis advisor, then kicked out of the doctoral program, she shouted. "You?' 

Frask looked back, shocked. 

"Same," she said limply. (p. 178).

Sometimes I think the reason for the anachronisms is to bring home the point that women haven't made much progress, and that they are still staying home maybe watching cooking shows that seem to take them seriously, maybe relying on husbands for their identity, maybe being shut out of professional goals. This book made me laugh and made me think. So maybe it doesn’t matter if the details or right. Or maybe it does. I can’t decide.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander

Not Fizzy

 

Fizzano! This Chianti was quite nice with our pizza dinner. What’s in a name? It’s not even a bit fizzy! In fact, it’s a nice little red from a boutique vineyard. Here’s what their website says about one of the wines in their repertoire:

“Arriving at the Tenuta Fizzano estate and finding yourself in front of 35 hectares of highly specialized vineyards with an enviable south-westerly exposure, featuring highly ordered rows that work their way across sinuous hillsides, it is easy to understand why ‘Chiantishire’ is renowned the world over. This is the evocative backdrop against which we harvest the grapes that will be used to produce our Chianti Classico Gran Selezione Tenuta Fizzano. Bright ruby-red in color, with ripe berry fruit overtones and a strong mineral note, it is an elegant wine that lasts and lasts on the palate. It has a verve and a character that allow it to mature over time without losing its fascination.” (source)

Fizzano! Wouldn’t Chico Marx be the perfect owner of a winery with a name like this?

As for the pizza: we defrosted a ball of dough that we froze the last time Len made pizza. He used a mixture of tomato paste, garlic, and olive oil brushed onto the crust and then just a few anchovies and some cheese. Very simple.

Pizza and Chianti!

This was our dinner after a long day devotedly watching all six new episodes of the Icelandic police procedural that’s now called “Entrapped.” Several years after the earlier series (called “Trapped”) ended, the two main detectives are reunited to pursue a murderous gang of  motorcycle-riding, drug-smuggling, woman-abusing, obnoxious and dangerous Danish criminals. Hinrike is still the chief of police in the small town on the fjord in northern Iceland, and an amazing brave and effective police officer. Andri and his old rival Trausti join her in chasing down the bikers while also working on a murder involving a strange new-age cult. Yes, Andri still drinks milk, but this time he tries something stronger, too. Very dramatic and fun to watch.

We enjoyed binging on Season 3 of "Entrapped." SHOWN ON NETFLIX.

Review © 2022 mae sander. 

Shared with Elizabeth and the Tuesday blog party

 

Good Movie

We watched the second Enola Holmes film on Netflix. It manages to be both very funny, full of almost unbelievable chase scenes, and also suspenseful. It has very good actors, starring Millie Bobby Brown and including Helena Bonham Carter. A major plot element — protest against abuse of the women who work in a toxic match factory — is based on actual history. 

As far as I noticed, there’s not a single bite of food consumed or mentioned in the film (correct me if I’m wrong) — though I always look for food scenes. I didn’t miss them. There’s very little food in the original Sherlock Holmes either. 

Here’s the most surprising thing about it: there is a character named Mae.

Review by mae sander © 2022