Two quick food & cooking related notes from the past weekend:
1) We’ve made the Roasted Tomato & Fennel soup recipe we came up with several times over the past few months, always to great acclaim. As a follow-up, Scott decided to try a new version of the recipe with a medley of roasted root vegetables (carrot, parsnip, and turnip, plus a leek and some garlic cloves). We weren’t sure whether beef of chicken stock would go better in this version, so we did a split-test and did half-batches in separate pots with the different stocks. The result was tasty, but not quite as successful as the tomato-fennel version. We’ll try again with some other combinations in the not too distant future.
2) We saw Ratatouille. I share Ruhlman’s highly positive take on the piece — with one caveat. My feminist funnybone got dinged by the fact that the movie was set up so that Remy the rat ALWAYS knew better than Colette when it came to food. She’s presented as a highly talented line cook who worked her butt off to get where she was. Couldn’t she be right at least once?
Remy is a male.
Males ALWAYS know what they are doing.
So, logically we conclude that…
IMHO, Collete should have dated someone who is not a complete klutz.
BTW. Isn’t Remy the cutest animated critter you have ever seen?
Anyone be better than Our Brave Hero? C’mon, FL, that is so far outside the Disney viewpoint as to not even be visible from Der Fuhrer Factory. (NOTE: Only people that have worked for a certain 6-foot rat can use that highly accurate phrase. Ask your local Disney employee why.)
Now, if Remy was a female rat all along, then there would be no problem with anything, now would there?
Hmm, I hadn’t noticed that but I plan to see the movie a second time in the theatre so I’ll see how it strikes me.
I was very impressed with the scene where Colette explains how she made it in a male-dominated environment. That’s dangerous territory for a mainstream (children’s!) movie, and I thought it was a brave and important inclusion.
(Or, if you want to go a bit more in depth, you could say it only confirmed the notion that women have to be like men in order to suceed. “Gah”, as they say.)
Fantastic movie.
@off – good point.
@melinda – yes, Colette’s intro scene was fantastic and new territory. I wish they’d done more with that, rather than just turning her into the standard female romantic prop. Ah well. I still enjoyed the movie, though.