Review: The Golden Compass

I have a general principle that, if a new f/sf movie starts popping up on the radar and I have any interest in seeing it, and if I haven't already read the text it's based on, I'll wait to read the text until after seeing the movie. As a general rule, it's a lot easier to forget about the contents of a movie when reading an associated book than to forget about the contents of a book when viewing an associated movie. And both from a critical and an experiential point of view, it's fun to see a movie without having the built-in expectations of knowing the book. ( Read more... )

Further appetizer experiments

Carrot Clumps -- I think I've solved the physical integrity issue. Substitute corn starch for the rice flour; it creates a more reliable binder. Then take baby arugula leaves and fold each one around a small dab of the carrot paste. The sharpness of the arugula complements the sweetness of the carrot paste nicely. I made up one pound of carrots' worth of carrot paste, then used about half of it to make up ... oh, about five dozen leaves' worth. I lost count. As a very rough estimate, that comes out to maybe 4 cal apiece, well within my per-bite target. On the other hand, having made up that many, I think unless I'm doing them for a very large party, that's too large a recipe. I think I may see how well the other half of the batch freezes.

Cauliflower Puffs -- I'm officially giving up on these. I tried going a more pancake-like route (a bit more egg, slightly larger amount of flour, brown in a lightly greased pan) with no more success at the physical integrity than before. There are many wonderful things that can be done with cauliflower, but low-cal croquette-like objects do not appear to be among them.