Welcome to Cinenoms, my no-longer-active food and film blog. This site was a great creative outlet for me in graduate school and the months that followed, a place to practice writing in a “casual, personal blog” format while also talking about two of my favorite things, movies and baking. I no longer post here, but I plan to keep it up 1) to demonstrate that I know how to use WordPress and 2) for the memories (and the recipes!).
-Margaux
Good news, everyone who hasn’t fully planned your Mother’s Day brunch menu yet: I’ve found your dessert. Start with an easy, light bundt cake with a great lemon flavor, fill it with a bunch of fresh fruit, and you’ve got a dessert that’s both delicious and beautiful. What more do you need?
Note: This post is the second in what I’m hoping to make a weekly feature. Do you plan to spend a weekend night or two watching Netflix, then instead spend most of the night trying to decide what to watch? This is for you. Recommendations from me. I’m including runtimes, links to IMDb profiles and basic topic info, where I can. Let me know what else you’d like to see. Thanks!
Something very exciting is happening this weekend in my college town, Columbia, Mo.: The True/False Film Festival. It’s a four-ish-day extravaganza centered around documentary films. I went three times while I was in school and had such a great time, seeing great movies and learning a lot. If ever you have the chance to go, please do.
This year, I can’t make it to True/False, so I’m planning to make up for it by having a little Netflix documentary film festival of my own. And you should, too! Even if you’re “not a documentary person.” Before I went to my first True/False, I wasn’t, either. I hadn’t seen many documentaries, and I had it in my head that they were boring. Wrong! So wrong. True/False taught me how fantastic they can be, how they can be just as gripping as “normal movies,” how they’re inspirational and entertaining as much as they are educational or informative. I learn, I laugh, I cry, I cheer, I get angry. Documentaries are great.
I’m going to give you two lists: Documentaries I’ve seen and loved, and documentaries I want to see. Use them to plan out a festival of your own! One of the things I love most about documentaries is that they’re generally pretty short, so you can get two or more in a night, if you want. Everything listed was on Netflix as of Feb. 26.
Confession: As I was making these, I couldn’t shake this weird feeling that I was doing something terrible. I mean, you get Thin Mints once a year, maybe twice if you’re lucky, and there I was, smashing up half a box of them, turning them into a different cookie entirely. I felt like a monster.
But you know what? If making these makes me a monster, I’ll take being a monster. These might be the most amazing cookies I’ve ever made.
Logged in to Facebook to find a dozen distraught, stream-of-consciousness messages about the new #HouseOfCards episodes from @gauxmargaux.
— Zach Murdock (@zach_murdock) February 16, 2014
“THIS SHOW ALWAYS GETS WORSE
STILL GETTING WORSE
ok it got better?
I don’t even know. I have so many feelings.” — @gauxmargaux
— Zach Murdock (@zach_murdock) February 16, 2014
(Actual tweets by my friend Zach, in response to messages I sent him while watching House of Cards season 2.)
Note: This post is the first in what I’m hoping to make a weekly feature. Do you plan to spend a weekend night or two watching Netflix, then instead spend most of the night trying to decide what to watch? This is for you. Recommendations from me. Let me know what else you’d like to see. Thanks!
If you’re already watching House of Cards, this post is not for you, because I know you’re not struggling to pick something to watch. By the time you’re reading this post, you’ve probably already watched half of the new season.
If you haven’t watched it yet, seriously, go, watch it now. Season 3 launches today (Friday), and if you try hard enough, you can watch through the weekend and be caught up in time to freak out over it with your classmates and coworkers on Monday.
House of Cards is the original Netflix original. It tells the story of Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), a congressman from Georgia who gets passed over for Secretary of State in the pilot, then spends the rest of the first season getting his revenge. He wreaks more havoc in season 2, and I’m a little scared to see where season 3 goes. Frank is brilliant, but he’s terrifying. He’s power-hungry. He’s ruthless. He’s polarizing. I think that you can tell a lot about a person by what they think of Frank – if he’s your favorite character, sorry, I will probably always be a little wary of you.
So, you have terrifying Frank. And you have his wife, Claire (Robin Wright), who is his match in so many ways – just as powerful and ruthless, even if she’s more quiet about it – and who wears some amazing clothes, oh my gosh. You have Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), the eager young journalist who is smart and determined but also fairly naive. You have Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), Frank’s right hand, who is very loyal to Frank, which is scary. You have Peter Russo (Corey Stoll), the troubled, drug-addicted congressman, and Christina Gallagher (Kristin Connolly), the younger campaign worker who loves him. And so many other wonderful characters.
This show is smart, suspenseful and just the right amount of terrifying. There’s political drama, rivalries, betrayals, affairs and deaths. It’s perfect for people who love politics or journalism or ruthless people or great businesswear or just good stories. It’s high-quality — David Fincher of The Social Network/Fight Club/Gone Girl was involved at one point, and Spacey and Wright have won Golden Globes for their performances (check out Spacey’s lovely acceptance speech, which gets great starting at about 1:20). It’s the perfect binge-watch show, even though it has 55-minute episodes, because it keeps you on the edge of your seat. And you will have feelings. So many feelings.
House of Cards, Netflix original. 3 seasons, 39 episodes, 55ish minutes each.
The Oscars don’t start until Sunday night. You still have time to catch plenty of movies that have been nominated! Here are some of the ones you can still find.
I’ve included mostly movies with Best Picture and/or acting nominations. See the Oscars’ website for a full list – there are some technical-category nominees around, too.
Still In Theaters – Some more than others, check your local listings.
– American Sniper
– Birdman
– The Imitation Game
– Into the Woods
– Selma
– Still Alice
– Theory of Everything
– Whiplash
– Some theaters – I’ve seen AMCs – are also showing roundups this weekend of all the nominated shorts.
On DVD – Check stores, online stores, OnDemand services, RedBox or your local library.
– Boyhood
– The Boxtrolls (animated feature nominee)
– Gone Girl
– The Grand Budapest Hotel
– How to Train Your Dragon 2 (animated feature nominee)
– The Judge
Streaming On Netflix
– Ida (foreign language nominee)
– Virunga (documentary nominee)
What am I missing? If you’ve seen anything else out somewhere, please comment! Happy viewing!
The 2015 Academy Awards are upon us! With just under a week to spare, I’ve finally seen all eight Best Picture nominees. It was a good year, overall — there wasn’t really anything that blew me away as much as past years’ winners, like “The King’s Speech” and “The Artist,” but in general, I enjoyed most of the nominees. I didn’t quite stay on top of things in terms of posting as I saw each film, so instead, here’s my roundup of all eight of them. They’re not really in any particular order — the last two are my bottom two, and I put my bet for Best Picture (though not necessarily my pick, if that makes sense), but I waffle on my rankings of the rest.
Friendly reminder: I am not a professional movie critic? I’m just a person who likes movies and the Oscars. You’ll see various comments about things like acting and pacing and camera work, but for the most part, I’ve evaluated these movies on how much I enjoyed them. I’d love to hear your thoughts on them, too — please feel free to comment away!
Food-wise, there are few things that are a bigger treat for me than Country Ovens dried cherries from Door County, Wis., one of my favorite places on Earth. I can only get them a few times a year, so when I do, I try to make them count. That used to mean eating them carefully, rationing, so they lasted. Now it nearly always means baking.
I got a bag of cherries as a gift a few months ago and stashed it in my baking box, waiting for a special enough occasion to bake the cherries into something great. One finally came along, so, at last, cherry chocolate chip cookies. Let me tell you, they were worth the wait.
Dried cherries are bigger and moister than a lot of raisins, so they bring a lot of flavor. And with the chocolate chips? A+. I’m hoping to get dark chocolate chips for next time, but for today, these are just wonderful. Yum.
The recipe’s just the tried-and-true one from the Quaker oatmeal lid. Can’t beat it. 🙂
What’s your favorite limited-time treat? What small food joys do you treasure?
Transparency note: No one paid or asked me to say anything nice about these cherries! I’m a lifelong fan. No dried cherries come close to Country Ovens’.
Every holiday comes with some baking, but I think that Thanksgiving and Christmas come with the most. For Easter or the Fourth of July or any other holiday, you can eat whatever dessert you want — cake, ice cream, pie, tons of chocolate, anything. But for Thanksgiving, you have to have pumpkin pie. For Christmas, you have to have cookies. Those are just the rules.
There was a pumpkin dessert at my Thanksgiving this year — admittedly, a roll cake, not a pie, so I guess we bent that rule — as well as this amazing cranberry cake that my mom found and we made together. Cranberry sauce is my favorite Thanksgiving food, and I loved getting that flavor in our dessert, with some orange thrown in. Check out Leah Eskin’s recipe in the Chicago Tribune if you’re a cranberry fan, too.
For Christmas, we made many, many cookies. My mom likes to teasingly remind me that when I was growing up, I hated the cooking and baking parts of Christmas preparation — it just “wasn’t me,” I said, probably with some overly dramatic tears. These days, I get into it gleefully — this year, I was up working on cookies until at least 2 a.m. two nights in a row. I made:
I didn’t get a picture, but I also made these Homemade Jingles from Shugary Sweets. Have you ever had Jingles, also known as Santa’s Favorites? I grew up eating them at Christmastime and assumed they were a standard thing, but when I talked about them at school in Missouri, no one knew what I was talking about, so maybe they’re a Chicagoland thing. They’re cookies flavored with anise, a spice that tastes kind of like black licorice, and they were always sold topped with red and green sugar sprinkles, cut into Christmas shapes like stockings or wreaths. I just learned that they have been discontinued by Keebler, which is sad news, but I guess that means I found this recipe just in time. I’ve tried a few sad copycat recipes in years past, but this one is the real thing. Fans of the classic cookies will be satisfied.
And I know this isn’t a dessert, which breaks my theme, but these brussels sprouts with cranberries are too pretty not to share. After I found the recipe, from Rachel Schultz’s Household Almanac, on Pinterest, I showed it to my mom, who is brussels sprouts’ No. 1 fan, and she put it on our Christmas menu. I can’t tell you about the taste personally — sorry, Mom, I’ve never liked brussels sprouts! — but everyone who ate them seemed to enjoy them.
I’m not quite done yet with holiday baking — my high school friends and I celebrated a few baking-heavy New Year’s Eves, and although everyone is spread out this year, I intend to carry that on. But it’s been a fun few weeks of tasty eats, and it’s put me back in baking mode after a few months off. I’m all stocked up on candy mix-ins thanks to after-Christmas sales, and more frequent baking (and blogging!) is on my New Year’s Resolutions list. Stay tuned. 🙂
If you baked something great this holiday season, please share! What are the traditional treats around your house? Did you try anything new this year that you loved?
This blog has been rather neglected this fall as I have been focusing on completing my master’s degree. But it’s almost December, which means three things are coming: graduation, my yearly “Winter Break” rush to see tons of Oscar contenders, and lots and lots of holiday baking. Expect a return to regular blog activity soon.
In the meantime, if you have any requests for types of recipes you would like to see, feel free to leave them in the comments. I have many things on my to-bake list — let me know where you’d like me to start!
UPDATE: I have launched the “official page” for my 2015 Oscar Project, where I will be tracking what I have seen and want to see. Check it out — link in the sidebar!
Cinenoms 