EnnaEel Cooks

May 25th, 2008

Missouri: Where they never feed you snakes before ripping your heart out and lowering you into hot pits.

Posted by LA in Film, Recipes, Seafood


Gingered shrimp with soup noodles and kai lan. There has been much time for insanity the past couple of days. This has left me with no time for grocery shopping. Thus, I now present lastminutecobbledtogetherdinnerforLA.

lamian
kai lan, blanched
2 c. vegetable broth
1 egg
2 t. sesame oil
2 T. rice vinegar
1 t. fresh cilantro, chopped
1 T. ginger, minced
1/2 t. white pepper
2 t. honey
6 medium shrimp, peeled, deveined, brined
2 green onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced

  • Mix vinegar, cilantro, ginger, and honey in small bowl. Season shrimp with salt and pepper. Heat 2 t. sesame oil in heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add green onions and garlic; sauté until aromatic, about 3 minutes. Add vinegar mixture and shrimp to skillet; stir until shrimp are just cooked through, about 3 minutes.
  • Cook noodles in vegetable broth until just tender but still firm to bite, stirring occasionally. Drain. Transfer to bowl.
  • Poach the egg in remaining vegetable broth, and pour over noodles. Add kai lan and shrimp. Garnish with cracked pepper.

    For this recipe I sort of mish-mashed a bunch of familiar ideas together to make something new.
    I was standing in the kitchen, looking at the peanut butter and bananas I’d just set out to make maybe my 8th ‘nanner in a week, and I thought “I can do better.”
    Not that the ‘nanner isn’t capable of great things. Perhaps someday it will earn its place with its very own recipe entry. Maybe.

    I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull recently.
    What I don’t understand is this: How can films like The Mummy and National Treasure borrow so heavily from the Indy franchise and still remain successful, while Indy borrowing these bits back makes for hilarity of the variety that I doubt neither Spielberg or Lucas intended?
    Monkeys? Beating up on villians? Really? Really?
    What happened to the Indy that pushed for the MPAA to create a PG-13 rating?

    The first and only Indiana Jones movie I experienced when I was little was Temple of Doom.
    This may have created a bias. Temple and Terminator 2: Judgement Day were the only films my father owned in English. Whenever I spent time at his house, I watched them backwards and forwards, and by the time I was 12 I could repeat every bit of the dialogue back to you, word for wonderfully quippy word. (Seriously, one of the best lines in any Indy movie has to be Short Round’s exclamation of “Dr. Jones, no time for love!”)

    By the time I got around to seeing Raiders and Last Crusade, I was a bit thrown off by the sudden shift to more Euro-centric adventures. The Indy I knew and loved was running across precarious rope bridges with a machete, not making eyes at German double-agents in Venice.

    Technically, Temple is Indy’s first film adventure. And it shows. You can see him still a bit intoxicated with the idea of “fortune and glory.” But not so much as to prevent him from risking his life to help a desolate village. Indy embarks on his quest for the Sankara stone due to completely unpredictable circumstance – literally dropped right in the thick of it . At least in the other films, he had a choice.

    I could go on about the great use of sidekicks, superior action sequences, or surplus footage of Harrison Ford sans khaki shirt. All would be more reason to hold Temple of Doom above all 3 (I hesitate to say 4) Indiana Jones films.

    But maybe a wee (itty bitty) bit of me enjoys having a favorite that is least-liked by most.

    • Reading:: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World