2009 September | Booth Bay Dinner Theatre & Movie

Bacon, Lentil and Cabbage Soup

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

bacon-lentil-and-cabbage-soup

After not having much luck with soup yesterday, we decided to try again today. As we are both going out relatively early this evening, we had the soup for lunch. It worked out a lot better this time, despite being a made up recipe. In fact I’m going to add the recipe to the post in case we want to make it again.

Ingredients:
1 medium to large onion
1 stick celery
1 medium carrot
1 large clove garlic
1 bay leaf
1 sprig thyme
1 tin tomatoes (400g) or equivalent amount of passata
1 litre vegetable stock
125g puy lentils / lentilles vertes (very rough estimate as I just poured in what I thought looked right)
8 rashers of bacon (we used a “black” sweet cure bacon for this and it worked very well indeed)
5 or 6 cabbage leaves
olive oil
salt and pepper

Finely chop the onion, celery and carrot. Add a little oil to a large saucepan, heat it up to a medium heat and then add the onion, celery and carrot, letting them fry for a few minutes. Crush or finely chop the garlic and add that too, then add the bay leaf and thyme and season with salt and pepper. Give it all a good stir, then turn down the heat and put the lid onto the saucepan to allow it all to sweat for about ten minutes.

When the vegetables are softened but not colouring, add the lentils, tomatoes and vegetable stock. I pureed the tomatoes before adding them, but if you don’t want to do that then you can break them up with a spoon once they are in the pot, or just use passata. Let this simmer until the lentils are cooked, adding some more water or stock if the liquid level drops too far.

While the soup is simmering, cut the bacon into strips. Fry these in a frying pan. When they are done to your favourite level of crispiness / burntness, put them onto a plate on a piece of kitchen paper for the oil to drain off. Press another piece of kitchen paper onto the top of them to blot off more oil.

When the lentils are done, de-stalk the cabbage leaves and finely shred them, then add them to the soup. You might need to add a little water if there isn’t enough liquid to cover the cabbage leaves. Add most of the fried bacon too, just reserving a little for decoration. Put the lid back onto the saucepan and simmer for about 5 minutes until the cabbage is cooked but still nice and green.

Serve, sprinkled with the reserved bacon pieces, and eat with some buttered toast. Delicious.

As I mentioned above, the bacon that we used was a sweet cure bacon, which worked very well in this recipe. We used it because it was what we had, but it was brilliant; the sweetness combined well with the tomatoes and the earthiness of the lentils. This could be made more wintry by adding a dash of wine to it and a few other adjustments. It could also be made vegetarian by adding fried mushrooms instead of bacon.

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Miso Soup with Taro (Satoimo no Miso Shiru)

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Miso soup is called “misoshiru” in Japanese. It is a traditional Japanese soup in which we use dashi for the base, then mix with miso paste. I used satoimo (small taro) for the soup this time, it is little different taste than potato miso soup. Taro becomes soft and sticky!

Yield: 4 servings
Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

4 saitomo
4 oz Aburaage (deep fried tofu)
1 green onion (chopped)

Spices

1 tsp Hondashi
1.5 tbsp miso paste

Preparation

Boil 2 cups of water with taro until taro gets soft (about 3 minutes)
Add hon-dashi
Add miso and stir, then add green onion. Adjust miso to taste, and serve!

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EXCLUSIVE: Todd McFarlane Speaks On The Story And Future Of ‘The Twisted Land Of Oz’

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

This week, fans get to celebrate almost a century of “The Wizard of Oz” with a 70th Anniversary DVD/Blu-ray release of the 1939 film. It’s fitting then that we have some exclusive new information to share with you on the screen adaptation of Todd McFarlane‘s “The Twisted Land of Oz” toy line.

MTV Splash Page editor Rick Marshall spoke to the man himself recently, and he was more than happy to delve into the project’s genesis, some basic story elements and what the future holds. There’s new stuff in here, things you haven’t heard yet. The short version: this ain’t your granddaddy’s “Wizard of Oz.” “Spawn” creator McFarlane has some dark ideas kicking around in his head, and they mesh very well with the inherently creepy qualities of “Oz.”

Just coming to the point we’re at today has been quite a ride for McFarlane. The “Twisted” line of toys performed well enough that McFarlane received a call from “Hollywood” asking if there was a story to go along with the action figures. There wasn’t one at that moment, though he had a pitch prepped in the space of a week. Warner Bros. bit and Michael Bay was attached… but only until “Transformers” stole him away. And we all know how that turned out.

More recently, “A History of Violence” writer Josh Olsen stepped up to pen a script. McFarlane’s chief concern is delivering an Oz that is darker than what people know. As he told execs during pitch meetings, “Number one: you have to turn off the switch to the [1939] MGM movie. If you don’t turn off that switch, almost everything I’m about to say will not make sense to you.”

See, what makes a man like Todd McFarlane so successful is an understanding of his audience. He’s not out to bring “Oz” author L. Frank Baum’s words and world to the silver screen; he simply wants to be inspired by it. “Basically,” McFarlane reasoned, “what do I have to do to sell a 22 year old kid going to college [to come] see something called ‘Oz’?”

“There’s a lot of wink wink, nudge nudge stuff, so ['Twisted Land' isn't] completely devoid of what we’ve come to know,” McFarlane said. It may not sound like it based on the story’s setup, but the parallels are there.

“In mine, [Dorothy is] up in the Antarctic, and there’s bad weather,” McFarlane said. “The point is that when you’re in bad weather in a s–tty place up north, it is completely gray. That would be our ‘black & white [sequence].’ Then she falls into her Shangri-La, called Oz, where suddenly everything’s in color.”

As anyone who knows the toy line is already aware, familiar characters aren’t left out. They look a bit different, but all are present and accounted for. The biggest of the changes, in more ways than one, is to Dorothy’s lovable dog.

“There’s still a thing called Toto, except its the biggest thing in the movie and not the smallest thing. [The beast called Toto] basically ate the first dog, and it’s this big thing that [the inhabitants of Oz] ride. They’ve given this generic word… so instead of horses, [people] ride Totos.”

Unfortunately, Olsen’s script did not deliver in the way that McFarlane had hoped. “Josh came in and I read the first draft. I told [Olsen] I was curious about how we went from what I pitched to what I called ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.’” Hollywood apparently agreed.

“My understanding is that [the studio] thought we went a little too conservative, so somebody else is taking a crack at [the script] now. We’re never going to get as crazy as I wanted, so I have to accept that. My pitch is fairly radical, if you will. If you’re 22 years old, it’s not radical. If you’re an executive, it’s radical.”

For any changes being made to his original idea, McFarlane isn’t terribly troubled. “I think there will be a compromise,” he said. “I’ve told [the studio] that it’s okay, I understand the business side.” Which isn’t to say that he’s totally on board.

“I just found it odd that they bought that cool, creepy ['Twisted Land of Oz' pitch] and now they’re taking a step back.” Not a big one, mind you. Remember, the Olsen treatment is still out.

“I think the first script was just a little soft for them,” McFarlane explained. “I’ve always been a believer that the reason remakes don’t work is that they stay too true to the source material. Hopefully we’ll have a new script in the next month or two, and then we’ll be a lot closer to seeing whether it will grab some true momentum or whether we’re heading into development hell here.”

Time will tell. I’m certainly hoping that momentum gears up on this project soon, as the land of Oz is ripe for the “darker” treatment that McFarlane’s envisioned.

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