Weekly Round Up: Something Old and Something New

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I made both an old and a new recipe from Cheap Lazy Vegan, I'll recap my first week as a non-runner, and I'm talking Bogie and Bacall movies.

Eats

The first thing we need to talk about is my latest food obsession, which is gochujang.  Huh?  What?  It's a red chili paste that's a staple of Korean cooking.  A while back I'd gotten a tub of it from the grocery store, but it didn't make much of an impression on me and made its way to the back of the fridge where I found it a few years later and threw it away.  

Fast forward to present times and all of the Cheap Lazy Vegan videos that I've been watching gave me a yen to try gochujang again and how convenient that Trader Joe's now sells it in small quantities so I picked some up the last time that I was there.  

Exhibit A: CLV gochujang pasta and meatballs.  Very easy to make and uniquely good.  I only made two servings and the first night it was good and the leftovers were incredible and I'm now hooked on gochujang.

My changes to the recipe were:

• Regular milk instead of a plant based milk since it's what I had and oh yes I'm not vegan.  But don't worry, those are "plant balls" instead of meatballs just to stay in the spirit of the thing.
  
• I skipped the instructions to save some of the pasta water to mix into the sauce.  Why?  Ha ha, I'm so used to just tossing the pasta and pasta water right into the strainer that at this point it's standard operating procedure that I forget to add pasta water when the recipe calls for it.  But there was plenty of sauce and I don't feel that it needed thinning so I'll continue to skip this step.
  

 That was the "something new" recipe of the title and the "something old" was that I revisited the Korean "fried chicken" (a.k.a soy curls) recipe that I made a while back and adored.  It was good when I made it the first time with sambal oelek and even better now with gochujang.

Based on these results, I think I'll be making room in the fridge for a larger tub of gochujang.  It's hard to describe, but it's a very lovely, unique taste.

Workouts

Since I've stopped running for the time being, I'm not sure how much I'll have to say about workouts going forward except that I like the new normal.  I finished week one of six of Caroline Girvan's Iron Series this week, so my workouts are about 30 minutes of strength and then a 1 to 1.5 mile treadmill incline walk as a finisher.  If you're playing along at home, I do 5% incline and mostly 4.0 with random 4.5 speed intervals to spice it up.  Incline walking uses a different set of muscles than running so that's why I'm only doing short distances to start with so that my body gets used to it. Plus I'm only planning to ramp it up to 2 miles since I want to keep my total workout time down to an hour.

So if I'm not running what's the status of my relationship with my Garmin?  Yep I still wear it as a smart watch and an alarm clock so it's not going anywhere.  At first I wasn't going to bother to track my workouts anymore but toward the end of the week I started just for grins and oops I was not correct when I said last week that incline treadmill walking gives me all of the effort and sweat as running but at a lower heart rate.  The effort and sweat part was correct and once I started recording the workout I can see that the ol' heart rate tracks right where running did.  TBD if I'll keep tracking my workouts or not. 

Watching

When you know how to whistle but a lot depends on who's in the saddle...I spent my holiday weekend rewatching all of the Bogart and Bacall movies and here is the recap that nobody asked for.  Let's start with the whistle line:

And then the saddle line (grr on the subtitles but it's the only clip of the line that I can find that isn't 10 minutes long):

It all started because my stepsons have been in to noir which made me want to see The Big Sleep again which then spiraled into me wanting to rewatch all of their movies in order.  At first I wasn't sure how many there were: yes there's To Have and To Have Not, yes there's The Big Sleep, yes there's Key Largo, and yes there's that movie that no one remembers that I saw sometime in high school and surely I wasn't remembering correctly that it was about plastic surgery???  Yep that's the full count and when I saw that the Movie That No One Remembers was on HBO Max it was Game On.

Heads up: very minor spoilers for the three movies that everyone's seen and a lot of spoilers for the other one

To Have and To Have Not.  I remembered this as being a good movie, but it was a bit more on the OK side for this watch.  It's 1940 and Bogie is hanging out on an island and sticking his neck out for nobody because we're still trying to milk the Casablanca cow.  Lauren Bacall shows up and the action stops cold for about half of the movie run time so that they can banter and honestly it's fine because nothing much is happening anyway.  And then he helps the French Resistance at first for money and then for free because he's Bogie.  The End. 

The Big Sleep.  What's it about?  Never mind.  This one has a reputation for a confusing story line but it's so good that you won't care.  Phillip Marlowe solves a murder.  The End.

The book is equally as good, so my recommendation is to see the movie first and then read the book.  It's worth checking them both out since there were a few things from the book that couldn't be brought into the movie due to censorship.  It's fun to see what's hinted at and what just gets dropped in and not explained because they can't (example: the bookshop that doesn't sell any books). 

Dark Passage.  The movie that no one remembers and it's for a reason!  I don't think you'll believe me when I tell you what this movie is about but let's try it anyway.  Bogie has been wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and escapes from prison.  We know it's Bogie from his voice but we never see his face for reasons that will soon become apparent.  Bacall's father was wrongfully convicted of murdering her stepmother and died in prison and for some reason out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she's been following Bogie's case and just happens to be driving by on the day of the escape and gives him a ride into town and lets him stay in her apartment.  A manhunt ensures and his picture is in every paper so when a random cab driver tells Bogie that he knows a doctor who can give him a new face for $200 in the middle of the night with one hour's notice he's all in.  The doc describes the procedure and says "yeah I'll make you look older while I'm at it so that there's a plausible reason for the age difference between you and Bacall that no one cared about in any of your other movies".  One week later the bandages come off and sure enough Bogie is underneath and the new face with the same voice fools even his closest friends so that he can find the real murderer but can't prove it so he has to leave town for Peru and as soon as the heat dies down Bacall joins him and they live happily ever after the end.

In case you think I'm trashing the movie, let me be clear that it has solid noir elements and great actors plus the shear entertainment value of how outrageously bad the story is so I'm kind of recommending it?????????  The real question is just who did Bogie and Bacall piss off that made them make this movie?????  It is definitely the thing that is not like the other things.  And you know what else is missing?  The banter.  There's not one line of it.

Key Largo.  We're back into good movie territory.  Bogie comes home from the war and visits the father and widow of one of his soldiers out in Key Largo.  The father owns a hotel which has been taken over by a bunch of thugs and a hurricane rolls in so it's lucky that Bogie showed up when he did and hey that widow's got to move on some time.  The End.  Oops there's also no banter in this one.

Anyhoo my ranking is:

1. The Big Sleep and of course it's not on streaming but it's such a fun watch.
2. Key Largo
3. To Have and To Have Not
4. Dark Passage

Reading

I haven't been able to get into anything but now I have the itch to check out The Big Sleep so I think I have my next book.