Stories

The Oscars are less than a week a way, and most people have already weighed in on their top choice for the year. So now it’s time to match your top choice with the perfect Oscar Entrée.

1. The Artist (Michel Hazanvicius) has been taking people’s breaths away—and voices. To match the brilliant silent picture, how about some cotton candy, which is a bit old school, light and full of air—the perfect, tasty, silent addition.

2. Join War Horse’s (Steven Spielberg) horse and feel free to treat yourself to a bowl of uncooked spaghetti, so you can join the main character (the horse), as he gnaws on straw.

3. Head out to the ballpark with Moneyball (Bennett Miller), and bite into a jumbo hotdog and extra large fries.

4. Laugh along with Minny (Octavia Spencer) in The Help (Tate Taylor), and indulge in double chocolate pie—leaving her SECRET ingredient out. Please. And thank you.

I’m pretty ambivalent about the Olympics. I watched the opening ceremonies so that I could hear the announcer say “ceremony” the British way, and because I love a good national spectacle. I was thrilled to hear Branagh recite Shakespeare, I am always teary when I hear the opening strains of “Jerusalem,” and I admired the man-made Tor that acted as centerpiece to Danny Boyle’s history of Great Britain.

He lost me somewhere around the Industrial Revolution hand jive, and I was kind of skeeved out by the childrens’ nightmare sequence with “Tubular Bells” and a gigantic baby; taken as a whole, the idea seemed to be that children were tucked into bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital by smiling, dancing doctors and nurses and then abandoned to nightmarish characters from literature until they were all saved by a fleet of Mary Poppinses. Presumably the Marys speared Voldemort, The Queen of Hearts, Captain Hook, et al with their proper British bumbershoots and eased the minds of all of us who associate “Tubular Bells’ with Linda Blair’s green and rotating head.

But I digress. My problem with the Olympics has nothing to do with its location (a place, frankly, that I would rather be than where I actually am) and everything to do with sports-related media. If a person is interested in watching Olympic coverage during prime time, which is the only time we watch television in this house, one is necessarily watching network coverage. Network coverage is kind of like “American Idol” with contestants who swim, vault and run. Favorites are cultivated, highlighted and vignetted; we are basically fed everything we need to know about who will probably win, who we should like, and why.

We think this video by Julia Fowler is hilarious!! 
Make yourself a plate of James Moore’s amazing biscuits and gravy and pull up a chair...

We went for a cocktail-hour potluck last week at Paule and Flavia’s place. They’re both architects and they live in a house of their own design in the medieval village of Poreta.

We had been to visit them once before and I pretty much sort of knew where it was. It was up this steep little street, I remembered. Well, it’s not a street; it’s more like steps that you walk up but cars use it, too. It’s a medieval thing. I have driven up a number of stairways in my time, in quaint European villages, but never intentionally.

So, we parked at the bottom and trudged up the steps in the direction of the twelfth century castle that crowns the hill. I figured I’d recognize Paule and Flavia’s place when I saw it. By the time we got to the top of the hill, I thought I had seen three possible candidates but no clear winner.

We walked back down the steps, which was a lot easier than going up but Jill was tiring of carrying the bowl of hummus and the plate of raw vegetables that we were adding to the lucky pot. I carried the wine, which is a husbandly duty.