November 10, 2007 at 11:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized, Movies
Mystery Science Theater 3000’s premise was limitless: as long as there was bad content around, there was new material to mock. Its demise at the hands of a fickle Sci-Fi Channel in 1999, therefore, was met with much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. It was not dead, merely resting, for it has risen, albeit it many forms from many factions.
Literally every major player involved in producing Mystery Science Theater 3000, onscreen and off, is now creating new quasi-MST3K related material aimed squarely at the MST3K fanbase. They’ve divided themselves up, and understanding the different groups might help you decide who to give your money to (although I plan on giving it to all of them as long as they turn out a quality product):
- Mike Nelson (Mike), Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo 2.0 [well, 1.0 for everyone who didn’t see the show’s original Minnesota run, which is most people] ) and Bill Corbett (Crow 2.0) really never left MST3K behind. After the show ended, they took on various solo projects, but remained frequent collaborators, and stuck with what they knew: Bad Movies. hey’ve actually got two ventures in the new MST3K martket:
- Mike Nelson brought us the first MST3K-esque project last year: Rifftrax, which provides downloadable MST3K-style audio commentary for blockbuster crap like Transformers and Independence Day, beloved classics like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and most recently old awful movies like Missile to the Moon. Mike goes solo on some, but frequently collaborates with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett on others. He’s also got a few guest riffers to join him, like Neil Patrick Harris on Willy Wonka and Fred Willard on Missile to the Moon. I’ve listened to several now (even a few with my wife, who never dug MST3K’s host segments, so appreciates that it’s all movie) and have loved them all.
- Nelson, Murphy and Corbett are also collaborating on The Film Crew, a reimagining of MST3K without the puppets. While Rifftrax supplies the commentary while you supply the DVD, The Film Crew have individual episodes on DVD, complete with host segments and special features. I own all four, and have watched three of those, and it really captures MST3K perfectly. I was also subjected to Rue McClanahan stripping, but that’s just a bonus.
- Joel Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (the original Crow and Doctor Forrester), Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank), Mary Jo Pehl (Mrs. Forrester), and Josh Weinstein (the original Tom Servo and Dr. Laurence Erhardt) all left the show of their own accord well before it ended (with the exception of Mary Jo Pehl) to pursue other things. Either the pastures weren’t much greener or they needed to scratch the same itch the fans have had for so long, and they’ve come together for Cinematic Titanic. They’ve teamed up with, of all people, ILM, and are hinting very strongly that their world premiere will be the until-now rare Star Wars Christmas Special, put out on DVD with Georgie’s blessing. December 10th is the street date.
- Jim Mallon (MST3K producer and the one that holds the rights to MST3K, preventing the above from recreating the show) and Paul Chaplin (MST3K writer) have teamed up to create animated episodes featuring Tom Servo, Crow and Gypsy at MST3K.com, along with a bunch of clips of the host segments from the original series. There’s only one up now and boy is it rough, but I’ll keep checking in on them.
I wish they’d all just get together for a group hug, but I guess I should also be happy that now they’ve gone from producing nothing to four different MST3K-like shows. Keep it coming guys, the wallet’s open.
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November 7, 2007 at 6:44 pm · Filed under Linkdump
Child Rapist.
Republican, of course.
I liked it better when it was just a bunch of anti-homosexual “Moral Majority” Republicans being forced out of the closet in increasingly amusing ways.
Ted Klaudt, formerly of the South Dakota legislature with a failed Senate run, raped his two foster teenage daughters 10 times to test their fertility after one of them expressed interest in becoming an egg donor. This took place on several occasions and was helped along by Klaudt’s pretending to be a female official from an egg-donation program using a fake email address. To complete the cycle of disgust, make sure to head on over to Amy’s Robot via the link above to see what ol’ Ted looks like.
October 22, 2007 at 8:14 am · Filed under Food
A few recipes snuck into Mark Bittman Week that didn’t originate with him, making for one great success and two moderately good do-overs.
- Oatmeal Scotchies, another stellar recipe from The Amateur Gourmet, turned out the best of the bunch. My only problem? I didn’t realize that the recipe produced 4 dozen cookies. Luckily, Deja and Reg were willing to ruin their diet to help alleviate the surplus.
- Perfectly Creamy Homemade Banana Ice Cream, from Chowhound, lived up to its name, perhaps too well. The texture was amazing and it is easy to see why people rave about homemade ice cream. The taste? Well, the Banana flavor was too much, overpowering all the other delicious ingredients: macadamia nuts, chocolate, and rum. Lisa’s theory is that I didn’t wait for the bananas to ripen enough, which is a good enough sounding excuse to make me try again.
- Picatta di Pollo (Chicken cutlets with lemon and capers), another Chowhound recipe, jumped off the page when Lisa saw it and she’s been hounding me to make it ever since. I wasn’t really leaping at the opportunity to cook it, seeing as lemons and capers are at the bottom of my list as far as foods I want to consume, so Lisa took the initiative and made it herself. The end result was actually quite delicious. The chicken was a bit overdone thanks to the still-unraveling mystery that is our new oven, but it was certainly a dish we’ll be trying again.
October 22, 2007 at 7:58 am · Filed under Food
Serious Eats has an ongoing feature called Cook the Book, in which they highlight recipes from a cookbook that they’re giving away that week. I was intrigued by the idea of doing recipes from a single source for an entire week and Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything has been my go-to cookbook for several years, so Mark Bittman Week was born. The intricacies of the schedules of myself and my wife as well as our varying levels of willpower led to Mark Bittman Week becoming Mark Bittman 1 3/4 Week, but that’s okay.
The results? A mixed bag, but largely positive, with several recipes becoming instant staples.
The food:
Baked Macaroni and Cheese (How to Cook Everything, pg 153) - This was the best of the pasta dishes I’ve made so far, which isn’t saying all that much. They’ve all been lacking, mostly due to poor interplay between the pasta and the cheese. It’s as if the cheese was an echo from previous dishes cooked in the same vessel. Maybe I’m falling on the Bittman side of the Bittman vs. Batali Saucing Debate, but then again, this was Bittman’s recipe.
Roast Chicken with New Potatoes (How to Cook Everything, pg 359) - I had just come off a miserable failure with James Beard’s recipe for Poulet Saute a l’Estragon and aside from the recipe’s casual instructions highlighting my weakness when it comes to reliance on strict instructions, my biggest problem was butchering the chicken. It was a slippery, brutal mess, and I could’ve gotten cleaner results if I had used dynamite. Still, chicken dishes were noticeably absent from my growing arsenal and so the idea of a whole roast chicken, carving required after cooking, was very appealing. The dish came out excellent, with perfectly cooked, moist and tender meat (something that can’t usually be said about chicken) and crispy potatoes, although I don’t understand why I had to have the potatoes elevated with the chicken on the rack…couldn’t they have benefited from the chicken fat below? The dish couldn’t really have been more simple, and so it’s elevated to staple status.
Broiled Chicken Wings (The Minimalist Cooks Dinner) - This recipe’s whopping three ingredients (chicken wings, extra virgin olive oil, tarragon) screamed “weekday meal” and it came through nicely in that regard. We’re still becoming acquainted with our new oven/stove, so the chicken turned out a bit dry. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed by moving down the rack or using the Low broiler setting, which seems like a contradiction in terms and just serves to make me nervous about undercooking.
Basic Meatloaf (How to Cook Everything, pg 495) - Is there a better dish with a less appealing name? One of the great things about the Bittman cookbook is that it gives you the basic recipes for some great dishes and then gives you several (sometimes several dozen) variations that you can make with only minor substitutions and alterations. The possibilities with meatloaf are seemingly endless, so it was only natural to get acquainted with the basics. The result was spectacular. We seriously considered throwing out the rest of the week and just eating meatloaf the rest of the week, perhaps the rest of our life. As a testament to Bittman’s recipe (or perhaps just the silliness of my recipe rigidity), the meatloaf came out perfect despite our figuring out that our instant read thermometer was broken well into the cooking process.
Chicken Adobo (How to Cook Everything) - Mark Bittman notes that many of his friends consider this the best chicken dish in the world. If I could have sex with my food (and really, no one’s stopping me, so maybe next time), I would make sweet love to this dish. It’s everything you could want from a dish: a return far in excess of the minimal investment of time and effort you put in. The only daunting part was that this dish required me to butcher a chicken again, which, after the James Beard incident, had me putting it off until I could no longer. I invested in both a paring knife and a boning knife just for the occasion, and it made the whole process infinitely easier. The knives cut through the skin with no effort, and the smaller blades made prodding for and finding the joints to sever a snap. I also used an alternate method for butchering chicken than the one I had previously gotten from the internet, this one found, where else, in Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The whole thing went smoothly, except for the part where I sliced open the side of my finger, but that was more a rookie mistake than any fault of the process. Lisa and I swooned over the dish, staring at each other in disbelief between bites. My only regret is that I boiled down the sauce a bit more (or just didn’t pour on as much) as I kind of made a soup at the bottom of our dishes. If I do that again, maybe I’ll just make more rice.
Cheese Quesadillas (The Minimalist Cooks Dinner) - a main course that got turned into a snack when friends came over on Saturday. It was ridiculously simple and only took about 15-20 minutes including both prep and cooking time. The only changes I would make would be to shred my own cheese as opposed to using preshredded, a shortcut Lisa had tried to use behind my back.
All-in-all, not a bad track record for a single cookbook, especially since most of the missteps can be attributed to me. Bittman Week will appear again soon, as he does podcasts for the New York Times under the Minimalist banner, and I’m anxious to make some of the simple, tasty dishes I’ve previously only envied from a distance.
October 1, 2007 at 7:42 pm · Filed under Linkdump
I’ve added the Worth Checking Out section to the sidebar for all the links I find in a day. They’re all seperate posts, with comments available for each, but they don’t clutter up the main page, where I like to write about boring things like what I’m ingesting. Enjoy!
September 30, 2007 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Food
An entire weekend of successes! It felt great to have everything come together and even better that my wife could see the advantages of her husband’s newest moodswing.
Here’s what we dined upon:
Friday night was a night without my wife Lisa, so I spent the large part of it tracking down the ingredients for Pancetta and Hominy Polenta. If one store had Polenta, it didn’t have Pancetta, vice versa, and absolutely none of them had hominy (and I went to five different stores!). I ended up making:
- A salad with gorgonzola dressing and crumbled gorgonzola
- Rib-Eye for One. I splurged and bought some aged beef from Stew Leonard’s. It was worth it.
A pretty tasty Cabernet Sauvignon I bought for the occasion accompanied it all, and although the night was planned as a movie marathon night, the food and the wine put me in a coma halfway through my first movie, A Night at the Opera.
My wife got home around 5 am on Saturday morning, so while she slept in, I made a big breakfast:
- Pancakes with warm Grade B Maple Syrup
- Brown Sugar Lacquered Bacon, the recipe for which advertised itself as a “bacon improvement” and, shockingly, it was. Who knew bacon could be improved upon?
She got some freshly brewed coffee along with it all, so it all turned out great.
For lunch I got to share some of that Gorgonzola salad I mentioned above, which I coupled with sliced fontina cheese and some pears.
Dinner’s highlight was not the main course, which was a Beef Stew we made at Dream Dinners. The highlight was the No Knead Bread. I had whipped up a batch of the dough the night before (in under three minutes, even) and we went through the very slight preparations for it together. The house was filled with the aromatic beef stew and the unmistakable smell of fresh bread. The bread was finished first and we slathered it with Kerry Gold butter, our eyes rolling back in our heads with each bite. Damn good bread.
Sunday morning was spent entirely in preparation for the coming weeks of cooking frenzy. We emptied out every drawer and cupboard, making the more frequently used items more accessible and storing the unused stuff (like our several unused cake caddies and the Butter Boy) in the closet. We whipped up another batch of pancakes before heading out to shop for more kitchen utensils and the night’s meal.
Dinner:
Every ingredient in the name Pancetta and Hominy Polenta proved near impossible to find, although find them we did, in seperate stores. The end result was well worth the effort, as was everything we made. Lisa was doubtful of the Rosemary Pears, but in the end enjoyed them even more than I did.
Lisa’s still referring to this as my “new cooking thing” in conversation but I hope it’s hear to stay. If I’m going to be fat, I might as well be fat from eating delicious food than another faceful of KFC.
September 27, 2007 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Food
I was going to post about how wasteful I was yesterday, but my actions today just compound the fact:
Yesterday I ordered, and had shipped with Two Day Shipping, a 32 ounce jug of Shady Maple Farms Grade B Maple Syrup.
Today, shipped separately, also with Two Day Shipping, I ordered a six-pack of 16 oz. cans of Carbon’s Golden Malted Waffle and Pancake Flour.
Counting transit and packaging, I’ve reduced the lifespan of humanity by at least another hour. Sorry.
September 26, 2007 at 3:54 pm · Filed under Food
Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools featured the Mr. Bento Lunch Jar last week and the concept was exactly what I was looking for. Eating out for lunch every day costs way too much and the kitchen in my office is just plain gross. The only happy medium seemed impossible: bring in hot food that’ll somehow stay hot until I was ready to eat lunch.
The Mr. Bento Lunch Jar is a large thermos with two vacuum sealed containers (one for soup or any kind of liquid, the other for solids) and two regular tupperware containers. The two vacuum sealed containers keep either hot or cold while the two tupperware containers are kept at room temperature. It even comes with a metal spork and a carrying case to make the thing as useful as possible.
Today was my first day using the Mr. Bento Lunch Jar and food that I heated up at 7:30 in the morning was piping hot at 12:30 in the afternoon. Screw eating out, now I can just reheat some leftovers, half a can of soup, throw together a tiny salad and some trail mix in the room temperature containers and I’ve got a four course meal that’s better for me than wherever I got takeout from and easier on the wallet as well.
The box advertises it as being able to keep food at temperature (hot and cold) for 6 hours and there will be days where I can test this claim more fully. I look forward to loving it as much as the people who make Mr. Bento porn.
September 26, 2007 at 3:31 pm · Filed under Food
Here’s a collection of recipes I’ve found around the web that I’m anxious to try out:
- Brown Sugar Lacquered Bacon - A recipe that dares say it can improve the natural perfection that is bacon? How can I not try it? There are a ton of variations on the Lacquered Bacon theme in that link, too.
- Risotto with Butternut Squash and Leeks - Risotto is one of those dishes that I would eat all the time if I wasn’t mystified by its production. It’s time to take that leap.
- Corn Chowder - from Jasper White’s book 50 Chowders. This may be my favorite chowder, so if I’m going to make my way through 50, might as well start with a bang.
- Rib-Eye for One - Back when Lisa was traveling, I had a lot more occasion to cook for just myself, and the recipes for the hungry single man were nonexistant. Now that I can’t get her out of the house, I’m stumbling on recipes that I’m dying to try. She’s going out this Friday, though, so I might crack this one out.
- Oatmeal Scotchies - Oatmeal cookies have long been ruined for me by the omnipresence of the raisin. I have no problem with the wonderful raisin, but I hate it in a cookie. Replacing it with Butterscotch? Genius of the highest order.
- Fried Apples - Served up with a little vanilla ice cream? Why the hell not.
- Mashed Potatoes - From Cooking for 2, a blog dedicated to recipes for two people. Portion control is a lot easier when there’s no more food waiting to be eaten.
- Oven “Fried” Chicken - the quotes are my own. Not sure where the fried part comes in, but if it even resembles a healthier fried chicken, it’s worth a shot.
- No Knead Bread - I’ve done a lot of baking with recipes out of Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” and it’s lightyears ahead of anything storebought. This recipe, brought to the world by the very same Mark Bittman (originating at the Sullivan Street Bakery) is so easy I may try it tonight.
I’m also looking for a good trail mix recipe. I bought some at the store after reading an AskMetafilter thread on breakfasts-on-the-go and it’s satisfyingly filling even in small quantities. Those small quantities cost like 4 bucks at the grocery store, so I’m looking to go at it on my own.
September 26, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under Food
Coquillettes au Comté et Pousses d’Epinard or, in language I can understand, Elbow Macaroni with Comte Cheese and Baby Spinach. This is a dish that’s specifically written as an individual serving, although the recipe appealed to Lisa as well, so I ended up cooking a double portion. The end result needed a lot more cheese to reach excellence, but it was intriguing enough to merit another try, this time following the recipe exactly.
Popcorn, the Old Fashioned Way: Talk about return on investment! It costs less than microwave popcorn, requires only slightly more effort, and is amazingly good. I’ve only cooked it once so far, drizzling a few tablespoons of melted butter on top the result, and I have been craving it ever since. I briefly flirted with popcorn for dinner just so I could get another taste at it, but I’ll have to wait for another lazy movie weekend.
Ziti in a Gorgonzola Cream Sauce: This one came out of Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, which has never let me down. Lisa and I were flipping throughthe cookbook, looking for a food project for the night, and we stumbled upon this dish, which is one of my favorite dishes in the world when I get Italian takeout down by my parents’ house. The end result was, again, promising, but a few missteps on my part led to a dish that was pretty good, but begged for another, better handled try.
Four Cheese Pasta: Some might call Cook’s Illustrated the Alton Brown of Food Journalism but Alton Brown is really the Cook’s Illustrated of Food TV (although Cook’s Illustrated produces the excellent America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, so I don’t know if he can even claim that). Just like Alton Brown, I partake in the entertainment portion and never cook the food. Lisa has made a couple recipes off America’s Test Kitchen with great success, but this Four Cheese Pasta was my first crack at it. This was, by far, the biggest success of all the dinner recipes I’ve tried. The four cheeses: Fontina, Gorgonzola, Pecorino Romano and Parmesan. After the pasta is boiled, you leave it slightly wet and pour it over the shredded/grated cheeses at the bottom of a large bowl, dump the accompanying heavy cream sauce on top of that and cover for five minutes. Of all the three cheese recipes I’ve made so far, this was bay far the best way of getting the most cheese-per-bite as the cheese is given proper time to melt. This one is a definite staple, although it’ll eventually make my heart explode.
The Farmer’s Market Brunch: sick of fast food and paying too much for crap, I decided it was time to make a good ol’ fashioned big breakfast this past Sunday. I got dressed and headed to Salinger’s Market by myself, leaving the sleepy missus to enjoy the lazy morning. I came home with: Thick Cut Bacon and Chorizo Sausages both smoked in a nearby smokehouse, a Dozen Apple Cider Donuts, a jug of Apple Cider, a small basket of pears, and a thing of pancake mix (I wasn’t energetic enough to make my own). We prepared everything together and it was far more rewarding and delicious than what we get from our usual trip to the bagel store. Even the pancake mix delivered some surprisingly good pancakes, topped with the best thing Alton Brown has ever recommended to me: Grade B Maple Syrup. I’ve kept away from maple syrup my entire life, finding the synthetic stuff in the grocery stores too sickeningly sweet. Grade B Maple Syrup makes me realize that I’ve been missing out on the true joy of syrup for far too long and that everyone else is slumming it with that Aunt Jemima crap.
Tonight I’m back to Dream Dinners, but I’ve got the cooking bug and it won’t be long before I try out my next recipe.
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