Hello lovelies! It's lockdown here again in Wales, so I didn't do a food post last week. Partially because we had not been eating new recipes (staying with safe foods as times are uncertain) and partially because I had lost track of time being in lockdown.
However, we recently ordered from a local independent business called Case for Cooking (think Penzeys Spices to my American peeps but made in Carmarthen) and got a Kicking Korma Curry Spice Kit. This is a special spice blend that you use to make fresh curry paste by adding a few ingredients such as tomato puree and ground almonds. Since it arrived we have had curry twice! The first time in a traditional lentil curry and this was just a clean out the fridge sort of soup and I decided to try out the korma paste in a soup and I am so glad I did! If you want to visit their website click on CASE FOR COOKING. They only ship within the UK, so sorry my American friends! Did I also mention all their spice pots are vegan and gluten free? I cannot love this company enough.
If you can't get any Case for Cooking curry paste then just use regular Korma curry paste.
Korma Carrot and Butterbean Soup
1 onion
2 large carrots
half a red pepper
garlic
1 fist sized potato, diced
3 cups hot vegetable stock
half a tin (or a whole tin) coconut milk --I used one of those little 165ml tins
2-3 TB Korma curry paste
1 tin butterbeans, drain and rinsed
black pepper
1. Use a food processor to chop the onion, carrots and red pepper into pea sized amounts. If you don't have a food processor, then just chop really small.
2. Add the onion, garlic, carrot and potato to a large pot and cover with the hot vegetable stock. Bring to the boil then turn down the heat and add the coconut milk and the curry paste. Simmer for 15 minutes or until the veg is tender and then add the butterbeans and cook for 5 more minutes. Grind on black pepper.
3. That's it. It was quick and easy. And super delicious.
Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you
sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.
This week we look at a cracking Spanish version made
in 2012 that is the most original take on Snow White I have ever seen. It is
set in 1920s Seville and centred on a female bullfighter. Did I also mention it
is a silent black and white film? As a vegan, I was a bit worried about the bullfighting
bit. I will admit, the film made it look more noble than it really is, but some
of that is the time this was set in. It is a period piece after all. But it is
clear from the filming and confirmed by the helpful “Making Of” extra that many
of the scenes of bullfighting were filmed with Blancanieves and the bull acting
separately and then the footage of the bull was overlaid on her as we view close
ups of her face and the spiders on her eyes I mean long eyelashes and her
swishy cape.
The film was
written and directed by Pablo Berger and was truly mesmerising to watch. According
to trivia on IMDB, it was shot on colour film stock and desaturated to black
& white in post-production.
The acting is superb. Both young Snow White and older
Snow White are very good. Especially the younger version played by Sofía Oria.
This was her first acting role and she had no prior experience. Her acting is natural
and spontaneous. The older version played by Macarena García mostly just had to
look wide-eyed/doe-eyed with moist slightly tearful eyes. The star of the film
however is the great Maribel Verdú (you may recall her spectacular turn in Pan’s
Labyrinth). Her face is so mean and her acting so good at conveying villainous
feelings through the medium of silent film as she glares smoulderingly from
beneath a black lace veil. The other star of the show is Gallo Pepe the rooster
who wears a jaunty little spotted neckerchief and is young Carmencita’s only
childhood friend and meets a sticky end from her evil stepmother Encarna. Which
is a great name as it includes the word carna which refers to meat.
I could not find a cohesive summary and so I have
combined two different summaries which I will insert comments into. The first
is a review by ROGER EBERTand the
second is a blog by SPANISH CINEPHILIA .
The story opens with a famous matador,
Antonio Villalta, who is filled with swaggering ego. All goes wrong for him. He
is paralyzed in the ring, and his beloved wife dies in childbirth. Their
daughter, Carmen, is raised by her grandmother until her death. Antonio
unwisely marries the heartless Encarna, his former nurse, who wants only his
money and ignores him as he sits in a wheelchair in his room. Note:
There
is so much to unpack here. Antonio is very pious. He spends ages praying at the
feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary before he goes out to kill a bull. We see
his manager/friend roll his eyes at the amount of time he takes to pray. A
local paparazzi with his enormous camera with a magnesium flash like the one below tries to get a photo but is rebuffed.
Antonio waves to his very pregnant wife in the crowd
and shouts, “This one is for you and our unborn child!” Later, at the end of
all the cape swishing when it is time for the bull to die, the relentless
paparazzi sneaks over and manages to get a photo just as the bull is about to
be slaughtered, but being a magnesium flash it goes BANG which distracts the matador
long enough for the bull to gore him and him make him a paraplegic. Then his
wife goes into early labour and after a very bloody birth (thankfully…I can’t
abide scenes of birth where there is no blood) she dies and he cannot bear to look
upon his daughter who is named Carmencita after her mother Carmen who had been
a very dramatic flamenco dancer before her untimely demise. You meet Encarna
here who is his nurse, and you can see the greed and long range planning on her
face as she sees him paralysed and hears that his wife has just died. You see
her making up her mind and then butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she nurses
him back to health. We see her feeding him like a baby bird and him becoming
more and more dependant on her. We also meet Carmencita (little Carmen) with
her grandmother and her best friend Gallo Pepe the rooster. There is a scene of
her being fitted for a communion dress and her effervescence shines through as
she cannot help but dance around with joy. All she wants is her absent father
to come to her big day at church, but he does not come. She feels unloved, but
she does not know he is sat alone in his wheelchair completely neglected.
Her maternal grandmother teaches her to
dance flamenco. When her grandmother passes away, Carmen is sent to live
with Encarna. Note: At
the party after her first communion, when the child is hiding under a table
because she is so sad that her father did not come to her big day, her
grandmother entices her out and they do a raucous flamenco dance with lots of hand
clapping and then suddenly the grandmother falls dead of a heart attack which
is a terrible thing to happen, but especially on the day of your first
communion. There follows a great scene where Carmencita’s white communion dress
is slowly lowered into a tin washtub and when removed is dyed black for
mourning clothes.
Encarna forbids the child from ascending the
stairs to the first floor – where her wheelchair-bound father lives.
Carmen is forced to sleep in a squalid outbuilding, and to work relentlessly on
the estate. Note: We see
Encarna cut off Carmen’s black curls giving her a haircut like a boy to try to humiliate
the girl. There is a really good montage of her working and you see the
struggles of a real life nine year old as she attempts to do the tasks.
One
day, she decides to defy her stepmother and venture upstairs because Gallo Pepe
has escaped. The child observes Encarna dominating the household's
chauffeur in classic boot-and-whip style. Note:
Yes,
we see the fabulous MaribelVerdú doing quite a bit of dominatrix stuff.
There is a later scene where she is being painting in her hunting clothes with
her dog and she insists that the chauffeur strip down to his underwear and wear
the collar and lead of the dog as the painter shrugs his shoulders as if to
say, “Rich people. What are they like?” While searching for Gallo Pepe, Carmen
finds her father stuck in his wheelchair.
Carmen
and her father develop a close bond: he teaches her the art of bullfighting;
and she dances flamenco for him. Encarna discovers this betrayal and
slays Carmen’s pet chicken Pepe. Note: This
is a horrific scene where Encarna invites Carmen to dine with her for the first
time and says “Would you like some PEPEry chicken?” and then plays it off like
she meant the spice not the bird, but then she lifts the domed lid off the
platter and you see poor dead Gallo Pepe complete with his neckerchief. This
puts little Carmen off chicken for life. We then have a transition which is
beautifully filmed where young Carmen is pegging out the wash and pretending
the laundry is a swishy cape and then
she becomes older Carmen who looks remarkably like Marcella Detroit from the
band Shakespears Sister.
Fed
up with caring for her invalid husband, Encarna hastens his demise by pushing his
wheelchair down the stairs. Note: There
is a scene after his death where they dress his dead body up in his
bullfighting costume and they take comedy photos with his dead body. She then arranges for her lover the chauffeur to
attack the now teenage Carmen in the woods. In a brutal attack he
strangles her, tries to rape her then drowns her. Left for dead in a nearby
river, Carmen is discovered by a troupe of dwarves, Los Enanitos Toreros. They
are bullfighters who travel between cities and look like characters out of a
Tod Browning film. As she has no memory of who she is they name her
Blancanieves, como la del cuento’ (‘Snow White, like her from the fairy tale’).Note: Here the dwarves are more like rodeo clowns. They have a comedy
act where they bullfight a calf. They also have some distinct characteristics—there
is the cross dressing one, the eye patch one, the kind handsome one (who
becomes a sort of sweetheart to her) and the angry, sullen one with the pencil
moustache who resents her plus two more who didn’t seem to have a distinguishing characteristic.
They take her on the circuit with them.
When Pencil Moustache dwarf is wounded, she leaps into the ring and
distracts the bull, using the matador skills she learned from her father which
makes him resent her even more. Eventually she, too, becomes a famed matador.
An unscrupulous agent named Don Carlos gets her to sign a contract that says: "Blancanieves gives exclusive lifetime rights to Don
Carlos for all properties, present and future." This will be her undoing. Through
them, she rediscovers her knowledge of bullfighting. She begins
performing with them, becoming famous in the process. But she still doesn’t
know who she is. As the story unfolds, Encarna becomes aware of the true
identity of ‘Blancanieves’, and attempts to poison her with an apple following
a victorious performance in the Plaza de Toros in Seville Note:
There
is a terrific montage of Encarna posing for the 1920’s Spanish equivalent of Hello! Magazine
where they take pictures of her in her show-home in a variety of extravagant costumes
with outrageous hats. She is told that she will be the cover article with her
fancy clothes in her fancy house, but instead Blancanieves makes the cover and
is their headlining feature while Encarna and her house are relegated to the
back pages and the photo they chose doesn’t even feature her face. In her rage,
she clouts her lover over the head with a statuette and then pushes his body in
the pool. It is here she vows to kill Carmen at the arena in Seville where she receives
top billing. At the arena an old friend of her father speaks to Carmen and says
how proud her father would be and as she is on her way out to fight the bull,
her memory comes flooding back and she knows who she is. Her stepmother is in
the audience and watches her beneath a black lace veil. Pencil Moustache dwarf,
who is still mistrustful of her, in a fit of anger switches the signs for the
bulls so instead of a calf, the meanest bull is sent out to meet her. With the
memory of who she is and her heritage now restored, Carmen swishes her cape and
fights the bull and then at the end the audience waves their white hankies—the sign
that the bull should be spared, so no blood will be shed that day. The audience
are throwing coins and flowers and hats into the arena. Like a snake, Encarna
slithers down with the apple and bumps into Pencil Moustache dwarf. She haughtily
dismisses him calling him Tom Thumb as she picks up the apple she dropped. She
offers up the apple to her stepdaughter, hiding her face behind the veil. We
see Carmen take it—there are heart stopping moments where she puts it to her
mouth, but then stops to wave to the cheering crowd. Then she bites and falls
down dead. Suddenly Pencil Moustache dwarf knows exactly who did this shouts
the Spanish version of “J’accuse!!” and they are after her. They chase Encarna
into the shed with the meanest bull who gores her to death. Here is where you
want a happy ending—the stepmother is dead, surely Carmen will wake up and
marry Kind Handsome dwarf? But alas, not so. The unscrupulous Don Carlo owns
her body due to the contract she signed, even in sleeping death. Here she
becomes like Sleeping Beauty. A side show freak, lovingly tended by Kind Handsome
dwarf.
Slipping into a coma, the girl continues to
function as a spectacle. Patrons pay a small fee to be able to kiss her
on the lips, in the hope that she will awake. The film ends with Kind
Handsome dwarf kissing Carmen on the lips: the camera closes in on the corner
of her eye, detailing a tear brimming at its edge. Note:
This ending had me in
floods. As you see the dwarf who truly loves her have to watch her violated
over and over for the price of a coin it breaks your heart. Her hair has grown
out quite long to show the passage of time. He is still devoted to her, but how
his heart must ache. At the end when the tear comes out—is this an autonomic
response or is she aware of everything that happens and cannot move to do
anything about it?
This film affected me greatly. The style and cinematography
was brilliant and the story fresh and original. You can watch the whole film
below, but the title cards will be in Spanish (though you can follow it well
enough without them.) But if you don’t have time or the inclination to watch a
full length silent film just watch the ending which you can see here:
The ending. *SOB*
The whole film:
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week for a
horror film version starring Marcia Brady.
Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you
sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.
Last week we looked at a spectacular period piece
starring Sigourney Weaver that showed deep emotions and a true look at what
grief does to you. I had really high hopes for this one as it stars Miranda
Richardson as the stepmother, but I was ultimately disappointed.
Snow White: The Fairest of Them All is
a 2001 fantasy adventure film that was produced by Hallmark Entertainment and it shows. The film had
a theatrical release in Europe but the following year it aired in the United
States on ABC as part of their series
on The Wonderful World of Disney which also
is not surprising.
What is surprising is that it was co-written and
directed by Caroline Thompson who wrote the screenplays
for three of my favourite films—Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before
Christmas and the Corpse Bride. What happened here, I know not but the dialogue
is flatter than a pancake that has been run over by a lorry and the costumes
are that generic “ye olde tymes” period of vague clothes that are just
suggestive of some general unspecific past.
As I said Miranda Richardson plays the stepmother and
a few times you can hear a bit of Queenie from Blackadder slip into her
inflection. Snow White herself is Kristin Kreuk whom you might remember from
Smallville and her father is played by Tom Irwin who was the dad in My
So-Called Life! Three of the seven dwarves are well known actors—Warwick Davies
(Willow among other things), Vincent Schiavelli as the not so dwarfish one and Michael
J Anderson whom you probably know as the dwarf who spoke backwards in Twin
Peaks but whom I think of as staring in Julie Taymor’s stunning reimagining of
Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop Frog entitled Fools Fire. The actors do their best, bless
‘em, but the dialogue is rather clunky.
But it is not all bad news. There are some interesting
effects. The magic mirror is a small
piece of broken mirror set in a spiderweb shaped wooden frame which acts as a
mirror, a flying weapon and a magic wand. There are a series of wall mirrors
that reflect like a fun house of images that can either enforce your narcissism
or taunt you into insanity.
The special effects are a mixed bag. There is some
great prosthetic makeup, but it is like they ran out of spirit gum as all the
prosthetics seem to gape away from the actor’s face as they speak.
Reviews were mixed which was no surprise. Here is a
summary courtesy of Wikipedia that I will inert comments into.
John and Josephine deeply wish to have a
child and when she is born with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and
hair as black as ebony, they name her Snow White. However, Josephine dies in
childbirth, leaving John alone with their child. Note:
I
loved the opening as it was on a bed of white apple blossoms that had fallen
off a nearby tree like snow instead of actual snow that the mother bleeds on to
make her wish, but that is all the blood we see as she gives birth in a
spotless bed and then dies without bleeding out after having a traumatic birth so
we were back to the unreality of white sheets and no placenta that so many of
these tales seem to have.
In
the winter, John struggles to find food for his daughter, eventually collapsing
and shedding a tear over a frozen lake, which frees a creature known as the
Green-Eyed One. Note: The guy who plays
the Green-Eyed one is the voice of Mr Krabs on SpongeBob SquarePants. His prosthetics
are quite good but they have a tendency to gap.
As thanks
for freeing him, the Green-Eyed One asks John what he needs. John requests milk
for his daughter, and the Green-Eyed One grants his wish. John then asks to
have his wife back, calling Josephine his Queen, but the Green-Eyed One cannot
resurrect the dead. However, he says he can give John a Queen, and John
suddenly finds himself a king with his own kingdom. Note: In a sort
of “this is not my beautiful kingdom” take on the Talking Heads, ministers
suggest perhaps he just had a bump on the head and forgot he was king of this
little country. So did the Green-Eyed One conjure up a country out of thin air
and then enchant all the ministers to gaslight the new king until he believes
it or did he bump off a ruler of an existing kingdom and threaten the ministers
if they ever revealed to the new king that he didn’t use to be the king?
Since the Green-Eyed One is obligated to
fulfil John's wishes, he pays a visit to Elspeth, his hideous spellcasting
sister. He transforms her into a beautiful young woman who can now marry John
and become his queen and Snow White's stepmother. The creature also provides
Elspeth with a magical mirror that allows her to see others unseen and to
deceive John. Note: she is truly ugly
with large warty lesions all over her face and she hates looking in the mirror
and feels like the Green-Eyed one is taunting her when he tries to make her
look at herself. So her vanity issues are less about aging and being the
fairest in the land and more to do with she is so excited to finally not be
hideous that she gets obsessed with her looks. He forces her to shatter the
mirror that showed her reflection as beautiful and glass rains down from the
sky and a piece of the mirror falls in Snow White’s father’s eye which makes
him see her as beautiful and overlook her less than appealing personality. She also has a yard full of garden gnomes
which will be important later. Watch that scene here:
As
years pass, Elspeth forms a good relationship with her new husband and
stepdaughter, now a beautiful sixteen-year-old princess. However, Elspeth is
vain and keeps a room full of magical mirrors which assure her each day that
she is the fairest of them all whenever she asks. Note:
This
was an interesting scene and gave Miranda a bit of range in that she had to say
“Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?” in about a dozen
different ways. She also has the small hand-held mirror cum magic wand and
killer flying object I mentioned above where only her face comes out of the
front of the mirror and the back stays flat and wooden. The wall of mirrors
each with her reflection all coming out in 3-D must have blown their special
effects budget. There is also a scene where her husband who is perpetually rubbing
his eye has the little piece of glass fall out after 16 years of it poking his
cornea and begins to see her clearly for the first time and realise how he has
neglected his daughter as he only had eyes for his wife. What triggered the
glass to fall out is seeing his beautiful wife reflected in all the mirrors
gave him a bit of *schwing* in the old codpiece and he tries to initiate sexy
times but she is repulsed and shoves him away quite hard and the glass falls
out and he sees clearly for the first time in ages. Watch that scene here:
When Prince Alfred arrives in the kingdom
and falls in love with Snow White, Elspeth is furious to discover that images
of Snow White are appearing in her mirrors, which means that her stepdaughter
is the fairest of them all. Note: Snow
Whitehas a great speech to Prince Alfred about how she doesn’t want to
be loved for just being beautiful—that looks are not as important as being
kind. Miranda Richardson SHAMELESSLY flirts with Alfred going as far as saying
how much older and more boring her husband is. All the while the husband (now
sans mirror in his eye) is giving that “Um…I am right here” sort of look to the
camera. She takes the sliver of mirror and tries to spike Prince Alfred’s drink
so it could get imbedded in his heart and he would love her not her
stepdaughter, but he clumsily drops the cup of punch while rubbernecking to see
Snow White. The sliver of glass pops out and lands in the eye of Hector one of
the servants. He in turn falls head over heels in love with her and agrees to
do whatever she wants in exchange for a snog.
Driven with jealousy, Elspeth orders a hunter,
Hector, to take Snow White into the forest and kill her, and then return with
Snow White's heart for her to consume. In the meantime, Elspeth also transforms
Alfred into a bear. Note: This is a nice touch as it mimics the
fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red about a prince that is enchanted in the form
of a bear. We see lots of scenes of a large bear roaming the woods and
mournfully calling out trying to say “Hey, wait! It’s me Alfred!” but it just
comes out like “Grrrrrr!” Then the stepmother makes him walk through the magic
mirror wand and he turns really tiny and she imprisons him in a snow globe
which floats down river until a racoon find it and jostles him about.
Unable to kill Snow White, Hector presents
Elspeth with the heart of a wild boar instead. When she learns the truth,
Elspeth kills Hector, imprisons John in her mirrors and stifles Snow White with
an enchanted ribbon. Note: Instead of being a pedlar peddling her
wares and enticing Snow White with a ribbon, she just leaves in lying on a rock
in the woods and Snow White thinks “Hey, here’s a lovely lavender ribbon that
someone has just conveniently left lying around in this deep dark forest. I
know! I will tie it round my waist like a generic costume sash!” Then it
squeezes her innards and stops her breathing. Interestingly, she has not met
the dwarfs yet. Every other version I know this event happens after she was
living with the dwarfs. Watch this scene here:
Snow White is saved by seven dwarfs, each
named after the days of the week and possessing the power to transform into a
rainbow to move from one place to another (but are only capable if all seven of
them are present) as well as control the weather. The eldest is Sunday, who is
a victim of one of Elspeth's spells that has left half of him as a garden
gnome. Note: Remember those garden
gnomes in the stepmother’s garden? They were friends of the dwarfs and Sunday
had gone to find out where they had disappeared to. He got caught and was
transformed to a stone statue. The evil Queen had brought them with her to her
new husband’s palace and Sunday in his garden gnome guise was Snow White’s only
friend growing up, so he recognises her and vouches for her to the other dwarfs.
When Snow White didn’t die from the strangling ribbon, he became half dwarf
again and although the makeup is effective in making half his face look like it
is still a statue, it gapes AWFULLY. There were times I thought I could probably
fit my finger in the gap as he talked which is not good.
The
dwarfs allow Snow White to care for their home, though the dwarf Wednesday is
initially suspicious. When Elspeth learns that Snow White is still alive, she
prepares a poisoned apple and transforms into Snow White's deceased mother,
Josephine, with the magic mirror the Green-Eyed One gave her. Aided by Monday,
who is turned into a garden gnome afterward, Elspeth (disguised as Josephine)
finds Snow White and convinces her to eat the enchanted and poisoned apple,
which seemingly kills Snow White. Note: There
are lots of tales (including this one) where one half of the apple is white and
the other red. The transformation scene on the apple was a decent effect, but
who in their right mind is going to eat an apple which looks like someone has covered
half of it in Tippex? It is also a really good move to have her take the guise
of the child’s own mother. Though she can’t recall her mother’s face being like
5 minutes old when she died, there is a *feeling* of warmth and familiarity
about the woman who brings her an apple. Watch the apple transformation scene
here:
With her task finished, Elspeth tries to
use the mirror to become the Queen again but she instead reverts to her true
form, even more loathsome than before. The Green-Eyed One appears and reveals
that her evil deed has cost Elspeth her beauty. Meanwhile, the dwarfs, unable
to revive Snow White, place her in a coffin of ice and leave her near Monday's
statue. When she receives a kiss of true love from Prince Alfred (in his bear
form) she is revived. Note: Sunday
the dwarf also recognises the bear as Alfred and vouches for him too. He breaks
the snow globe allowing the bear to take its full-sized form again. Then when
the Alfred sees Snow White encased in ice, he painstakingly licks through the ice
to give her the big wet sloppy kiss of true love.
The spells on Alfred, Sunday and Monday
are broken and Elspeth's mirrors shatter, freeing John. Elspeth is cornered and
killed by the gnomes she had turned to stone, who have been released from their
enchantments. Freed from Elspeth, the Green-Eyed One is able to go his way.
Snow White and Alfred live happily ever after while the dwarfs decide to move
on to find Sleeping Beauty. Watch the Queen’s demise
here:
That’s all for this week. I really wanted to like it
more than I did. However, if you are interested, you can watch the whole film here:
But stay tuned for a version next week that is a modern black
and white silent film from Spain.
Hello lovelies! This meal came to me in a dream (as so
many meals do.)
What? You don’t dream of food? Just me then?
I was craving pizza, but we were out of flour to make
a crust. I thought about the things I would have liked on a pizza (tangy red sauce,
sausage flavoured mushrooms and onions, kale on the side, cheesy sauce) and
thought about what I had which was an onion, mushrooms, potatoes and kale. I
had cheese powder for a sauce. I had everything to make an amazing meal.
So I cooked onion and mushrooms with sausage spices
based on a tempeh recipe from the PPK (Post Punk Kitchen) and added sautéed
kale. I boiled potatoes on the side and then coated them with a tangy red
sauce. Then I made up a batch of cheese sauce and drizzled it on. Hoorah! Pizza
flavours!
You can find the original recipe from the PPK HERE.
Tempeh is way more expensive than button mushrooms and this tastes just as
nice.
This was really delicious and easy to do, but it did
require 3 pots so a bit more washing up—but totally worth it.
A
Sort of Pizza Bowl
Sausage Mushrooms
1 onion, sliced into
rainbows
Lots of garlic, crushed
300g button mushrooms
Sausage spice mix (see
below)
Juice of half a lemon
2 TB tamari or soy sauce
100 g (several handfuls)
kale
Sausage Spice mix
1 TB fennel seeds
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tsp mixed herbs (mine
has thyme, sage and marjoram)
Pizza Potatoes
400g potatoes, cubed and
boiled until easily pierced by a knife
Red sauce—a few cloves
finely chopped garlic, ¼ cup tomato puree, ½ tsp basil, ½ tsp oregano, 1 tsp
balsamic vinegar, a TB water to thin it out
1. Cover your potatoes
with cold water and bring to the boil. Cook until they can easily be pierced by
a knife, then drain and set aside. Meanwhile, in a large pot sauté the onion in a splash
of water or vegetable stock until softened. Add the garlic and mushrooms and
cook down a bit and starting to brown.
2. Whisk all the
ingredients for the cheese sauce into a small pot and heat on low heat. When the potatoes are
done crank up the heat to medium and heat until sauce is bubbling and thick, stirring
every few minutes. Remove from heat when thickened.
3. When the potatoes are
done and you have turned up the cheese sauce, add the spice mix to coat the
mushrooms and the kale and the lemon juice and tamari/soy sauce. Cook the kale
and keep stirring until the kale wilts and turns bright green.
4. Add the drained
potatoes back to their pan and add the tangy tomato sauce and heat on low until
warmed.
5. Serve the kale and
sausage mix next to the pizza potatoes and drizzle with cheese.
6. Take a photo and then
smother with more cheese.
That’s it. It was easy…but
you do have to be watching three pots simultaneously. If you can’t cope with
that then cook the sausage mushroom and kale and the potatoes, then heat the
cheese sauce after.
Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you
sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.
For the next seven weeks we will be looking at film
versions of Snow White that star a great actress as the wicked stepmother. This
week we look an American musical/fantasy film from 1987 that was released as
part of the Cannon Movie Tales series. It was released straight to video and
stars the incredible Diana Rigg. Sadly, it will become obvious *why* it was
straight to video.
The cast is quite good—Dame Diana Rigg as the
stepmother, Sarah Patterson (Rosaleen from The Company of Wolves) as the older
Snow White (with generic Sylvia Young School of Acting girl as the younger
version.) Your dwarfs include one of my favourite actors Billy Barty as well as
Mike Edmonds and Malcolm Dixon who appeared in Time Bandits. Mike Edmonds also
appeared in Men Without Hats iconic video The Safety Dance. But the film is let
down, not by the acting, but by the script. It was written, directed and the lyrics and
music written by one man—Michael Berz. To give him credit, there are some beautifully shot scenes with interesting camera angles (lots of shots reflected
in mirrors of a furious Diana Rigg singing about being jealous of Snow White and one of her filmed though a large keyhole)
and the props like the magic mirror are really, really interesting. But it
should never have been a musical. The songs are generic and unmemorable and
sort of tuneless. They have no range at all as if they were written to be sung
by people who aren’t technically singers—and perhaps they were.
Wikipedia offers us a summary which I will insert some
notes into.
The film opens with a handsome young
prince traveling through the forest in winter with his men. In a forest glen,
the prince finds Snow White lying in a glass coffin. The seven dwarfs arrive
and tell the Prince of Snow White's story through flashback.
Note: This is a really interesting way to start it. I had
high hopes for it when it began this way but then the prince warbled a sort of
tuneless love song and my hopes were dashed.
A courageous King and his fair Queen rule
their kingdom well. One winter's day while sewing with her maids, the Queen
accidentally pricks her finger with her needle, and a single drop of blood
falls on the snow outside her windowsill. The King declares they will have a
child with hair as black as ebony, cheeks as red as blood, and skin as white as
snow. The Good Queen eventually gives birth to a daughter, whom she names Snow
White, but dies shortly after her child is born. Note:
Sewing
and singing. The mother seems a bit on the sappy side but she and all her
handmaidens enjoy singing in a Stepford Wife cheerful kind of way with her.
When she dies and Diana Rigg comes on the scene there is no more group singing
of sappy songs about snow. When she dies after childbirth, she is in bed with full makeup and covered in crisp white sheets. I suppose it is possible they changed the bloody bedding before her husband was called in to see her, but really if she was dying who would take the time to do that??
Some years later, the king marries again.
However, the new queen is evil and vain and jealous
of Snow White .
Watch a clip here where Diana Rigg does her best
singing a song and chewing scenery about Snow White being more beautiful then
her.
When her magic mirror tells her that Snow
White is now the fairest in the land, the Evil Queen orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill
her, and to bring back her liver as proof of her death. During a hunting trip,
the huntsman succeeds in taking Snow White away from her father, but Snow
White, realizing her stepmother's plan to destroy her, manages to escape into
the forest where she finds a cottage belonging to seven kindly dwarfs - Iddy,
Biddy, Kiddy, Diddy, Fiddy, Giddy and Liddy - who allow her to stay with them. Note:
Yes,
I rolled my eyes here too. There is a generic song sung by young Snow White
where she can’t keep any of their names straight. Also, it should be noted that
they all have completely different beds.
Like a rock hard one, and a squishy soft one, a dusty one, a skinny balance beam
sort of one and she has a weird singing montage about which bed is right like
she is Goldilocks and not Snow White. She ends up sleeping –no surprise—in the
only normal bed there is. Interestingly, the film says that the one whose bed
it is, slept an hour with each other dwarf so that she could have the bed. This
is texturally accurate as it appears in some of the very early literary
versions but here is just an excuse for a comic montage of a dwarf falling out
of several unsuitable beds. The King is heartbroken when he is told that
Snow White had been eaten by wild animals, and later he is killed in battle.
Years later, Snow White grows into a
beautiful young maiden. Note: An
interesting thing I never considered is that she will grow to a normal height
and eventually be too tall for their dwarf sized cottage with its low ceiling.
So that was an interesting point I had never considered. Here you can hear them
all taking turns to sing about their day. She sings of her domestic chores and
her growing too tall (which reminded me of Alice in Wonderland) and they wear
large hats shaped like giant mushrooms with a candle on each one (which is
*definitely* a fire hazard) down in the mines.
When the Evil Queen asks the magic mirror
"who is the fairest one of all", she learns that Snow White is still
alive. The Evil Queen attempts to kill Snow White three times. First, she
disguises herself as a gypsy woman and laces up Snow White in a tight bodice,
only for the dwarfs to cut the lace with scissors. The second time, she
disguises herself as an Asian comb seller and gives Snow White a poisoned comb,
only for the dwarfs to remove the comb from her hair. Finally, the Evil Queen
disguises herself as an old peddler woman and offers Snow White a poisoned
apple. Snow White resists at first, but relents when the Evil Queen cuts the
apple in half so they may share it. Snow White eats the poisoned half of the
apple and collapses. The dwarfs are unable to revive her, and place her inside
a glass coffin. Note: Okay, even the great
Diana Rigg cannot save this. Her attempts at costumes are so weird and her
accents even weirder. Her gypsy woman looks *exactly* like the stepmother but
with different hair and clothes (her face is the same) but with some strange
hybrid accent that is part Romany and part American South. Then it gets even
weirder. She appears as a Geisha with that “my feet have been bound and my
kimono is too tight and so I have to take baby steps” walk as well as a verging
on racist (or should that be lacist) accent. Who would believe that a Geisha
would be walking around the woods in the 1800s???? Then she finally disguises herself in a way
where she doesn’t look like Diana Rigg and uses an “Oo-arr oo-arr” West Country
accent for her peasant woman. The lead up to the poison apple was fantastic though.
She goes behind her magic mirror to her secret dusty laboratory where she
concocts a Frankenstein’s monster sort of apple (complete with the lightning
and “It’s alive!” sort of contraption). Does her husband not know she has a
secret evil lab in their bedroom? Did she say “Honey, I know I’ve just moved in
but I would like to have some construction work done but don’t ask the
contractor as I want it to be a surprise??” Who knows.
Here you can see Diana Rigg in unfortunate Yellow Face:
The film returns to the present, where the
dwarfs allow the Prince to take Snow White to a proper resting place. When Snow
White is being transported, the coffin accidentally falls off the wagon due to
a tree falling down by a snowstorm, causing the piece of poisoned apple to
dislodge from Snow White's throat, and she awakens. The Prince is enchanted
that Snow White magically revived herself and asks her to marry him, and she
accepts.
Invitations to the wedding are sent
throughout the land, and the Evil Queen receives one as well, leaving the magic
mirror into concluding that the Prince's bride is the fairest in the land.
Enraged, the Evil Queen smashes her mirror, which causes her to age rapidly.
She rushes to the church in time to see that the bride is Snow White, and then
disintegrates into ashes before heading back to the carriage. Snow White and
the Prince are married and live happily ever after. Note:
There
is a great scene watching her age in the carriage on the way to halt the
wedding. She arrives all hunched over and when the priest says “Speak now or
forever hold your peace” she opens her mouth and a tooth falls out. She turns
into a pile of dust as they look on horrified and then the priest says, “You
may now kiss the bride.”
Watch the ending here:
If you really want to see the whole film, it is available on Netflix.
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week as we
look at Sigourney Weaver as the evil stepmother.
Hello lovelies! We have had quite a bit of “something
yummy over polenta” lately. Polenta is cheap and filling and warm and cooks
quickly. What’s not to love?
This was a bit of a mash up of things we had in the
house…black beans, salsa, frozen corn and some powdered cheese sauce. So it was
Mexican Polenta drizzled with cheesy sauce. Yum!
This was also quick and easy. Made in about 20
minutes. Normally, when I make polenta, I add vegan parmesan cheese to it, but I
didn’t this time as I was making cheese sauce to drizzle on top. This would
take longer if you didn’t have the powdered cheese sauce made, but I always
have some on hand for macaroni cheese or nachos. Find the recipe for cheese powder HERE.
Mexican Polenta
Mexican topping:
1 onion, diced
Garlic
Tin of black beans (or
kidney beans), drained and rinsed
Jar salsa
1 cup frozen corn
Squeeze of lime juice
(bottled is fine)
Cook the onion
and garlic in a splash of oil or water and then add everything else and bubble
until the corn is no longer frozen. Meanwhile start the cheese sauce.
Whisk all together
and heat on low while you make the polenta.
Polenta:
4 cups vegetable stock
1 cup polenta
splash of non dairy milk
Bring the stock to the boil. I like to boil 3.5 cups
water in the kettle and then add some stock powder/cube to 1/2 cup that you
heat in your pot whilst the kettle boils. then add the boiled kettle and it all
comes to the boil much quicker than waiting for it come to boil from a cold
pot. Does that make sense?
Stream in the polenta to the boiling stock and whisk
constantly until it thickens. When it starts to spit, take it off the heat and
add a splash of milk. If it seems too stodgy, add another splash of milk then
return to heat and make sure it is heated and then remove from heat, add a lid
and let sit until the cheese sauce is hot.
Once the polenta is done, crank up the heat on the
cheese sauce and stir constantly while it heats, when it boils it will thicken.
Serve the polenta with the Mexican topping and drizzle
with cheese sauce. Then take a photo and drizzle on more cheese sauce.
This was quick and delicious after a long day at work.
Yum!
