Weekly Round Up: Currypalooza

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I launched Currypalooza 2024, cooked up a bunch of seasonally appropriate eats, and as usual I've got movies and books to talk about.

Eats

All of my foodie folks have been talking about Japanese curry lately.  It's a go-to for Cheap Lazy Vegan and Sarah's Vegan Kitchen, and in Cool Blogger circles Suzanne is a fan.  It was only a matter of time before I tried it for myself.  

I'm on a quest to try All the Currys, so I picked three things that looked interesting at the Asian market.

First up, Japanese curry.  I had a bit of trouble understanding the instructions on the box - the box had five cubes of curry roux and it said to use one per person and 2.5 cups of water...but was that 2.5 cups per cube or for the whole box?  I just wasn't getting it.  I winged it from some CLV and Sarah videos.  I sauteed some onion while I chopped up two potatoes and two carrots, and then simmered everything until the potatoes were tender in as much water as it took to cover the potatoes (4 cups for me personally).  I added a pack of frozen fried tofu later in the cooking process.  Once the potatoes were tender I dropped in the curry cubes and ended up using the full pack of five.

I can't describe the taste except to say that all of the people that I mentioned above would not steer you wrong.  I got the "hot" version which wasn't spicy at all and you know I like my spicy foods but it was so good that I'm not complaining.  I guess my only complaint is that I didn't realize that the pack that I got was only for a single recipe;-)  The cooking effort was "embarrassingly easy".  This is something that I think would work for family dinners and I'll let you know when I try it.  Sarah posted her recipe after I made the curry,  so the next time I make it I'll try her add ons (Worcestershire sauce makes everything better.  Coffee?  I'm intrigued).

Next up I made the Mabo tofu.  I picked it up because it sounded familiar, looked interesting, and it was near the Japanese curry.  At home with some help from Google I now know that Mabo is the Japanese version of Chinese Mapo sauce.

The instructions said to serve it with tofu and ground beef?????  Look obviously I eat meat but the combination sounded weird so I skipped it.  I sliced up a block of tofu and sprayed it with oil and seasoned salt and cooked it in the air fryer while I sauteed some onion and red pepper.  Once the tofu was done I added it and the sauce.

The result was perfectly fine but also perfectly ordinary, so I think this Mabo sauce is a one time purchase.  I kind of want to try Mapo to see what the difference is.  Let's put a pin in Currypalooza for now.  As soon as I finish the leftovers and I'll try the Massaman curry.

For family dinners, we took advantage of the cold and made some seasonal meals.

Shepherd's Pie on Saturday:

Gimme Some Oven's Beef Stew on Sunday.  I can't remember if I've ever made this particular recipe but I don't think I have so I'm counting it toward my goal to make 10 new recipes for family dinner this year.  I did NOT sear the beef first - in theory it sounds great but I think I heard somewhere that it doesn't really make a difference for a stew like this so I skipped it to save time.  I DID follow the suggestion to sub a cup of red wine for some of the beef broth.  This went over very well on a frigid day and between this and the Shepherd's Pie we have leftovers galore for the upcoming week.

Finally the best leftover save this week was my Sunday morning breakfast.  I had just a little chickpea salad leftover and I finally remembered to use it to make a "tuna" melt.  I toasted the English muffin, added the chickpea salad, and then topped it with a slice of cheddar and ran it through the air fryer for a minute to melt the cheese.  It was a yum, so I just need to remember this for the next time I make the salad.

Workouts

• I'm still loving the 3-12-30 workout (3 MPH, 12% incline, 30 minutes)
• For strength, I switched over to just some basic strength moves.  I'm doing the 5x5 program,  which is just a few simple moves - 5 sets of 5 reps.  Taking 90 seconds rest between sets felt like a little much, so I'm just taking 30 seconds of rest - if that's good enough for all of those Caroline Girvan workouts that I did then that's good enough for this.  Anyways, I like it and I also like that it takes 15 minutes so my morning workout time is down to 45 minutes total.
• I was able to take a long lunch on Friday and get in a hike for my winter hiking challenge.  I timed it exactly right because the minute I got back to my car the wind and the rain that kicked off this weekend's storm started up.  After that the temperature got below the level that I'm willing to take a two hour hike in, so the hiking project is on hold until it warms back up.
  

 

I giggled at having to climb over ONE tree on the trail.  It was a far cry from Tree Trunk Beach on Pelee Island last summer.

Watching

On the TV front, I finished season one of Upright and it was so good.  I'll start season two soon.

In couples' movie news, Hubs and I went on a blast to the past on Friday.  Fletch is on my list of all time favorite movies that I saw as a kid that have not gotten old with the passing of time.

Finally, let's start the transition from movies to books with a read-the-book-or-see-the-movie pairing.  I finished reading No Highway which is one of my all time favorite books, so it was time to see No Highway in the Sky again.  I hadn't seen it in a long time and from what I remembered it wasn't as good as the book but it had some good actors.

What I like better about the movie: the title.  I dunno, there's something about the extra words that pack a punch. 

What I like better about the book: everything else.

This video on the movie is a bit longer than I like to link to but if you've got 7 minutes and want a summary of the story plus the real life eerily similar aviation disaster that happened a few years later, this is a good watch:

The story is about an aviation engineer who's testing a theory that a new line of airplanes will experience metal fatigue after 1,440 hours of flight.  The problems are that his theory is inconvenient if true and being an engineer, he's one kooky bird who is into a lot of strange stuff in the name of science.  The book is narrated by his boss, who has to figure out where the truth lies between the extremes: are people's lives in danger or is the engineer a nut?  Or are both these things true?

Where the movie stumbles is that the engineer in the book is clearly Not Sexy - the whole point is how do you receive a message when the messenger is odd?  But no one was making movies in 1950 that were centered around Not Sexy Kooks, so the substitution was James Stewart playing the Absentminded Professor.  He may not be able to recognize his own house because all the houses on his street look alike but by golly he knows his metal fatigue.  Stewart is good, but he's not the character from the book, and the gosh oh gee I don't know my left hand from my right but I know that plane is going to fall out of the sky act wears thin.  The other actors in the movie are (1) terrific and (2) true to the book.

The movie also leaves out most of the action surrounding the engineer's daughter.  In the book he's a single dad who has good intentions but borderline neglects his kid and uses her in a psychic experiment that leads to finding the wreckage of one of the planes.  For some reason the movie doesn't want to deal with the neglect, so the accident that the kid has while the father is away doesn't happen.  The result is that everyone just happens to be hanging out at the engineer's house and poking their noses into his business because that's what people in old movies do - in the book they are there to look after the kid, but in the movie version nothing happens so there's just no reason for it.  I guess the psychic experiment didn't make it past the censors, but it was a much better story than the Hollywood "hey we just happened to find the wreckage at a convenient time for the story because it was that easy".

In the book the answer to is-this-plane-dangerous-or-is-this-guy-crazy gets worked out over time.  In the movie we get to 90 minutes in and it's time to wrap it up so everyone decides that it's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Stewart does a filibuster in a meeting and all of a sudden everything happens at once and boom we have our answer.  So book>>>>>movie but it was fun to see the movie as well.

Reading

It's no secret that my dog's death last November kicked off a comfort reading spree.  That's the reason for the Nevil Shute rereads and the Sue Grafton's Alphabet series.  I've still got more to go with those, but this week marked a shift in that I was finally ready to read something else.

The non-comfort book is Pete and Alice in Maine by Caitlin Shetterly.  It's March 2020 and a couple with marriage problems flees NYC to hunker down in their vacation home in Maine.  I've heard about this book in a few places, but it was Lisa's suggestion that it plays well with You Could Make This Place Beautiful that got me to pick it up.  If you think it's strange to read two books about troubled marriages in a row, all I can say is that it's a lot better than the time that I read two domestic violence books back to back.

Anyways, Pete and Alice is very good.  There are some parallels to You Could Make this Place Beautiful so for that reason it's really fun to read them as a pair.

I'm in a lull with podcasts which is fine since it means more audio books instead.  I started Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins which is a hot It book with the FIRE crowd.  It's a good read for my situation where in theory I could stop working but I'm hanging on to a job that I don't really like just 'cuz.  Lots of food for thought in this one.

Peace out!  Stay warm everyone!