Redmond Skate Park

 

House of the Devil

Neither David nor I have any idea how House of the Devil got on our Netflix queue. In fact, I don’t believe I had heard of the film before it arrived in the mail Saturday morning. Maybe it was.. the work of the devil!

It’s an early-eighties-inspired horror film about a college student who takes a baby-sitting job in – big surprise – a secluded old mansion next to a cemetery. It even starts off with one of those based-on-true-events-type warnings. Sounds cheesy (pun: there is something in the movie about pizza foretelling doom) but I thought the director did a good job of capturing that feeling of creepiness and unease that you expect from a good horror movie. I even got to go through my horror-movie survival checklist and checked off a few: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is; listen to your best friend; don’t eat the pizza!

Towards the end of the movie, there is a series of eight strobe-like pulsating flashes that I didn’t understand. Why eight?

The ending was a big let-down but the general the rest of the film made it worth watching.

When life dishes out too much sun, make sun-dried tomatoes

I’m wouldn’t want another canicule in Redmond this summer and am already planning my strategy for beating the heat. For instance, I could make sun-dried tomatoes. The recipe seems pretty straightforward. You cut up some ripe tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt. When they have dried on one side, flip them over and salt again. You need to repeat this for a few days until the tomatoes to dry out, so I might even start looking forward to the next sweltering day.

Shutter Island

I still have the haunting notes of Shutter Island’s ominous score playing in my head and I haven’t stopped thinking about the film since leaving Bella Bottega more than an hour ago. The movie was nothing like the trailer we watched when we went to see 2012 back in November: I got all the luridness of the Alcatraz-like asylum sitting atop a bluff on a remote island, but I didn’t get any of the supernatural and murder-mystery-type thrills that I was expecting this venue to deliver. The story was much deeper and darker than that, and I walked home feeling as blindsided as Leonardo DiCaprio’s federal marshal character must have felt when he got off that ferry boat and entered the topsy-turvy world of the asylum.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo were both impressive. This was by far one of the best films I have seen in a long time.

Los ninos

Valentine’s Day

   

Smen

I have a couple of traditional Maroccan recipes that list Smen as one of the flavoring ingredients. Naturally, Smen isn’t available at our local QFC or any other local food market (by the time I’m off my Mediterranean phase, North-African cuisine will be a family-night staple on the eastside). I asked one of the sales people at Sur La Table if the store carried Smen in their exotic herbs and spices section and she eyeballed me as I were screaming in the aisles for dried batwings.

Hoping to make my own Smen, or at least some version of the stuff, I borrowed a half dozen Moroccan cookbooks from the Redmond library that contained some traditional recipes. It turns out that Smen is simply clarified butter, mixed with dried herbs, and aged until it takes on the aroma and consistency of Roquefort cheese. This no doubt does wonders for couscous but I’ll stick with ras el hanout and my dried herbs.