This week, assorted thoughts on a collection of pleasant discoveries I have made in recent times:
On Culinary Substitutions
I was making some bran muffins for the kids this week (probably the least exciting type of muffin, I realize, but when they need some extra fiber you do what you’ve got to do), and discovered that I didn’t have one of the ingredients I needed. The recipe called for two cups of buttermilk, but I only had regular milk. I turned to Google with a question that many before me had undoubtedly asked: “Can you substitute milk for buttermilk?”
Yes, it turns out. Kind of. So if you add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of milk, and let it sit for a few minutes, you’ve got a perfectly satisfactory buttermilk substitute. I opted for the lemon juice, and just a few minutes later we were ready to go.
Later, I was making Shepherd’s Pie for dinner, and discovered that I had somehow overlooked yet another ingredient: I needed two cups of beef broth, for the meat-and-vegetable mixture that would be placed beneath the layer of garlic-parmesan mashed potatoes. This seemed like a pretty crucial ingredient, as it would not only provide a necessary amount of liquid during the cooking process but would also significantly impact the flavor. The obvious answer was to use chicken broth and hope for the best. However, I was all out of chicken broth as well. What to do? I was already too deep into the prep process to change plans. One way or another, we were having shepherd’s pie.
I decided to just use water as a substitute for the missing liquid, and figured that I’d find something else to compensate for the missing flavor. The recipe I was using called for a couple tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, which had already been added. But what if I added a couple more tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce? Would two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (a little goes a long way) achieve approximately the same savoriness of two cups of beef broth?
I think so. Obviously, it’s a somewhat different flavor. A more distinctly Worcestershire-y flavor. But there were a lot of other seasonings in the mix (salt, pepper, garlic, parsley, rosemary, thyme, tomato paste), so it nudged the flavor in that direction rather than fully defining it. It worked, for me, and for my customers. However, the real lesson here is this: read your ingredient lists carefully before you go to the grocery store, and you’ll save yourself the bother of trying to find workarounds.
On Bicycles
We used some of this year’s tax refund to get bicycles for the whole family. Rebekah had suggested we buy them pre-assembled from the store, but I said we’d save a little money by buying them online and putting them together ourselves. As I have learned so many times over the years, I probably should have listened to my wife. Assembling one bike can be a fun and rewarding little project. Assembling five bikes, on the other hand, is a prolonged chore (especially when one of them turns out to be defective, meaning you have to order a replacement and assemble the whole thing again). In a generous act of mercy, Rebekah volunteered to assemble mine after I had finished the other four.
All of the kids were immensely excited when they learned about the bicycles. For a few days in a row, my two-year-old would wake up each morning and start the day by uttering the words, “I can’t wait to ride my bike! I can’t wait to wear my helmet!” We let them all pick their own helmet designs. She selected a Paw Patrol helmet. Our five-year-old picked a helmet with bright orange flames protruding from the top. Our eight-year-old picked a helmet with red spikes forming a plastic mohawk on top. Collectively, they look a bit like extras from a Mad Max movie.
My eight-year-old hadn’t ridden a bike in some time, and he had never ridden one without training wheels. So I figured we would need to spend a day teaching him how to do it, helping him get his bearings. However, he figured it out on his own. He managed to ride his bike a small distance before he lost his balance, and then a longer distance, and in no time at all he was zipping all over the place with ease.
Somewhere in the middle of all this newfound bike enthusiasm, I played Queen’s “The Bicycle Song” for the kids, which my two-year-old fell in love with. Are the lyrics a little inappropriate for kids? Probably, but the things she loves about it are that a) Freddie Mercury sings “I want to ride my bicycle!” a bunch of times and b) that it has a section in the middle with a bunch of bicycle bells, followed by a feverish electric guitar instrumental section (“There they go!” she shouts when the guitars kick in).
On Cinematic Discoveries
I’ve been spending a lot of time watching Kung Fu movies recently. Specifically, the films included in Arrow’s impressive Shawscope Volume 1 collection, which offers a selection of movies produced by the Shaw Brothers Studio during the 1970s. My pal Josh had an extra copy of the set, and very generously passed it along, giving me a good opportunity to get a better view of a genre I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with over the years. I wasn’t surprised by the abundance of extraordinarily well-choreographed fight scenes in the set, but I was surprised by just how much vibrant energy and joy many of these movies contain.
This quality is perhaps best-captured by actor Chen Kuan-Tai, who appears in pretty much all of my favorite movies in the collection. The strongest piece of filmmaking here is probably Chang Cheh’s The Boxer from Shantung, which plays like a Kung Fu movie directed by Sergio Leone. Chen plays protagonist Ma Yongzhen, who casually refuses to bend to the will of local crime lords and ends up becoming their target and chief competitor as a result. Chen brings a cheerful enthusiasm to his fight scenes, entering them not with fiery stares but eager grins. He seems to enjoy displaying his moves as much as Gene Kelly seems to enjoy dancing (and does it with a comparable degree of physical skill). The film loves Ma, but it also sees him clearly: this is fundamentally an epic tragedy about the limitations of simply having confidence in your own fighting abilities.
The roles Chen plays shift considerably as he continues popping up throughout the set: he’s a gray-haired old kung fu master casually sipping his tea in the pleasantly formulaic Challenge of the Masters, an honorable father and husband too set in his ways to change his trademark fighting style in the insane-yet-genuinely-thoughtful Executioners from Shaolin, and a sneering bad guy determined to punish everyone in his path in the deliriously entertaining Crippled Avengers. But in every case, he has such a charismatic presence and takes such obvious delight in simply being there that not even clunky English-language dubs (these films are typically dubbed regardless of the actual language being spoken, so I flipped around between the Mandarin, Cantonese, and English options to see which ones sounded brightest and cleanest from film to film) can dampen his work. I smiled every time I saw his name appear in the opening credits, simply because I was glad to be spending time with him again.
Additionally, I recently got around to watching the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast, which my friend David gave me as a birthday gift a couple of months ago. It’s a simply-constructed but deeply moving tale based on a short story by Karen Blixen (who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen), about a French refugee who decides to prepare a grand feast for the small religious community that took her in.
It sneaks up on you, this movie. The first portion of the movie spends most of its time setting the table, giving you some backstory and explaining who everyone is and how their current circumstances came about. The second portion focuses on the arrival of the desperate Babette (Stephane Audran), and the kindness that she is shown by the two elderly sisters (Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer) who give her a place to live. The third portion focuses on the feast, and the effect that it has on those who participate in it. A simple story, presented in a simple manner, but each moment is so full of carefully-considered detail that the film itself feels like a proper feast. And when it ends, and finishes laying its last card on the table, the emotional impact is extraordinary. It’s a film that offers the sort of spareness and humane clarity that marks many Bergman and Dreyer films (it’s no accident that quite a few faces from their movies pop up in supporting roles here), and is fully worthy of standing alongside their work. It’s certainly one I’ll be going back to in the years ahead.
I suppose it’s possible that I would have gotten to these things on my own eventually. I’ve heard “oh, Babette’s Feast is really good!” often enough to mentally add it to the “I should watch that someday” list, and maybe I would have been tempted by that Shawscope set during a sale or something. But it’s just as possible they would have slipped through the cracks. My deepest thanks to the people in my life who placed them in my path.
Back at ya later