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51
Food and Drink / Re: What are you eating / What did you eat.
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on June 05, 2025, 11:14:27 AM »
I'm sorry to hear about the dog bite and the split thumb.  I hope it heals quickly.
There's a local pizzaria that has $3/slice Wednesdays and so we went by yesterday and got 4 slices.  For us that's two whole meals.  I had half a slice for lunch with mozzarella, tomatoes, pesto, and portobello mushrooms and fresh basil on top.  It was pretty tasty.  Not the best pizza ever but for the price and with it being so close, it was hard to resist.  What to eat when you are too tired to cook?  This is one of those things.  Heat and eat.

It's a weird thing to have to use the non dominant hand to do basic tasks.  I hope this remains a short lived thing.  Bad doggie.  I don't know if I'd hold onto a dog that would bite people like that.  Your aunt doesn't seem the type to really care, though.
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Food and Drink / Re: What are you eating / What did you eat.
« Last post by 8ullfrog on June 02, 2025, 02:14:24 PM »
I hate the mix dogs, which are hotdogs where they mix some portion of chicken, pork, and beef. I've obviously had "all pork" in the form of sausage, but... huh I guess I have had "all chicken" in the form of aidels. completely blanked that.

anyway my aunt's dog split my thumb like a hot dog so I can't open or prep anything. It's clean and I had it liquid stitched in seconds, but I didn't have any gauze so I'm cutting up cotton ovals.

That was not a fun medicine chest empty spot moment. I used to have a TON of gauze, but apparently mom gave a lot of my kit to the roommate when we left.

Not a fun way to find out. Did still have my waterproof tape though, so it's sealed good.

Opening a beer is now a challenge. I never realized I'd become left dominant for opening stuff, but I know now. Thankfully butter and bread are easy open. And I just bought a butter dish.  ;D
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Food and Drink / Re: Plant based alternative products Review
« Last post by 8ullfrog on June 02, 2025, 02:03:49 PM »
I love soy sauce, but sometimes "textured soy protein" makes me sick as a dog. And it's entirely too common as filler in a meat product.
54
TV / Movies / Re: Latest Movie You Watched
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on June 02, 2025, 11:44:04 AM »
That book led to one of my favourite wikipedia illustrations:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/CountOfMonteCristoRelations.svg

That's a great graphic and it does a good job of explaining the relationships between the various characters.  Since Tolstoy introduced over 500 characters in War and Peace, such a graphic would soon resemble a bowl of spaghetti.  The 2024 film really curtails a good deal of the revenge plot and leaves whole sections and characters out altogether. But I think it would be really difficult to do this book justice in a film.  I was surprised at how successful the recent film was, given the omissions and shifts in some of the interrelationships.
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TV / Movies / Re: Latest Movie You Watched
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on June 01, 2025, 01:27:49 PM »
The Count of Monte Cristo
This is one of my favorite novels and the film does a reasonable job of condensing a long arc of a complex plot into 3 hours.  The film doesn't feel overly long, although I split it into two viewings.

The actors are very good.  Lots of plot cut out and some substantially changed but it still managed to hang together.  After that train wreck of the BBC War and Peace, this was a breath of fresh air.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26446278/
56
Food and Drink / Re: Plant based alternative products Review
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on May 31, 2025, 11:43:13 AM »
That reminds me, I have used Impossible fake ground beef for a substitute in turkey chili and it was a reasonable substitute.  I did it for vegetarians I know.  Generally, I prefer the turkey.  As processed as ground turkey is, at least I have a fundamental understanding of the ingredients.

Impossible sausages were surprisingly good.

Generally, the Morningstar Farms products don't impress me.  The spicy black bean burger is ok, I guess, but there's a point at which, I'd rather experiment with making it myself, since none of these products is inexpensive.

I like Gardein products, generally.  The Mandarin Chickin is good if you produce a stirfry of vegetables to go with the chicken strips and the sauce is nice, with all of it ladled over rice.  They used to have fake crabcakes and I was amazed that they actually tasted like crab cakes.  They have fishless fish sticks that are pretty good with cocktail sauce.  I think their porkless pork bites are ok, too.

We tried to use the Beyond Chicken chicken strips but they didn't seem worth the bother when put in a stir fry. 

We had Dr. Praeger's mushroom risotto burgers and they were crap.  I'd rather just have the mushroom risotto.  Why try to dress it up as a burger and fry it?  None of their other burgers ever did much for me, either.
57
Food and Drink / Re: Plant based alternative products Review
« Last post by 8ullfrog on May 31, 2025, 09:48:21 AM »
First one I had was the Impossible Whopper. I enjoyed it, but I can taste and don't particularly enjoy soy.
Beyond I had at Carl's Jr, and the pea protein burger actually impressed me, but apparently they have massive business problems. I've never bought their ground product at the supermarket, and apparently I'm not alone.

Vegan products, I don't think I've ever been impressed, mostly egg replacements, and no dice. I don't think I've ever "enjoyed" any of the knockoff milks either.

I remember morning star hot dogs being pushed pretty hard in the 1990's, but they were HORRIBLE.

Quorn is a sin against humanity. It's sweet AND mushroomy, and apparently there wasn't any mushroom in it, which makes that WORSE.
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Food and Drink / Plant based alternative products Review
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on May 30, 2025, 12:28:42 PM »
I've been slowly working my way through a series of plant based burgers and sausages.  Several of us limit meat intake or are vegetarians so I thought we could share experiences with various products.  I'm not 100% sure that the same items are sold on both sides of the pond, but I'll start.

Boca Burger (soy protein concentrate base w/wheat gluten)
original American burger:  very good, among some of the better alternative burgers.
Vegan version of burger:  not as good as the original American version
Chicken patty:  very good, kind of like a "Chickwich" which is a processed disc of chicken breaded and fried like a hockey puck.  I like these with salsa on them.
Spicy chicken patty:  a bit intense but still flavorful.

Beyond Meat Burger (pea protein base):  These are super rich and the closest thing to a regular hamburger that meat alternatives have produced.   I used to love one of these on a toasted English muffin with barbeque sauce.  I'd cut them in half because they're so dense.  Since they decided to substitute avocado oil in the mix, I don't care for them as much since they seem off, like maybe a bit rancid, which is a shame.  They are also pretty high in calories so not a great diet choice.

Impossible burger (soy protein concentrate)
These used to be my second favorite, but lately I prefer them after Beyond Meat switched to avocado oil.  Nice fried up on a bun with some barbeque sauce.

Quorn (mycoprotein)
regular burgers, no longer sold. These were among the best on the market, based on processed mold proteins. I'd expect to be eating these on an asteroid belt some day.  It's not clear why they discontinued these.  (Apparently, some people had allergic reactions and, like me, many in the U.S. thought they were derived from mushrooms, but that's not the case).
Chicken cutlets.  It was hard for me to choke one of these down, dry and flavorless.

Please add to the list any that you have tried and can recommend (either to buy or to avoid).
59
TV / Movies / Re: TV WTF
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on May 29, 2025, 07:47:13 PM »
BBC 2016 War and Peace.
Imagine the dreariness of Russian court life during the Napoleonic wars given a sprucing up with the usual cast of teeny boppers under Tom Harper's direction.  Harper seems to take the most nuanced of plots and oversimplify them so that even half drunk harebrained citoyens can grasp the fundamentals (to what extent this blame is shared with Andrew Davies' script adaptation, I can't say).  That said, and despite my constant and urgent desire to hit Natassia in the face with a cream pie every time she opens her mouth to utter in the fruitiest of British accents the inanity of the moment, the cast is stellar from among fine BBC and even Canal Plus actors.  Natassia and her brother Nikolai are somewhat Disneyfied, and their parents (well cast and played by Adrian Edmondson & Greta Scacchi) seem to be conveying their characters' essences within the limitations of some ersatz direction (the characters in the book are much more complex, with the elder Rostov a kindly but inept money manager whose estates are in serious financial trouble, making his indulgence of his son even more irresponsible and the mother's indulgence of her male children at the expense of the female charges even more inexcusable).  There were some reasonable attempts to recreate the ugliness and waste of the state of early 19th c. combat, although I was hoping for some more detailed images of French soldiers and people lugging large cast iron cannons around, but that's just me.  I think this comes across as War & Peace LITE, and I lay the responsibility for the failures at the feet of Tom Harper.  Still, having read the novel a couple times within the past few years, I was interested to see how this would be adapted.  It was fun to see Mathieu Kassovitz of Le Bureau des Légendes as Napoleon.  Who better to fill such a role?

The choice of Paul Dano as Pierre Bezukhov is not unreasonable, although Pierre is quite a fat, awkward guy, and Dano is just awkward.  Pierre loses weight in the book, later, as an essential part of his character development, and his development in the BBC adaptation really suffers as a result of the compression.

Even the bad guys are given short shrift:  Prince Vasily Kuragin, his daughter Helene and son Anatole (two incestuous siblings) are all relentless social climbers who are disappointed not to inherit Count Bezukhov's fortune.  No matter, Kuragin manages to manipulate Pierre into marrying his horrible but beautiful daughter.  They are no more than cartoon villains.  In the book they are much more deliciously bad and plotting.  The actors don't have much to work with here but they do come across as regular scoundrels.  I seriously question the costumes for Helene as she looks more like a 1920's American flapper than an early 19th c. Russian princess.  What's with those weird tiaras?  Nobody else in the cast is wearing them either.  Gillian Anderson has next to nothing to do in her role as a socialite who hosts aristocrats at her large palace in St. Petersburg.  Rebecca Front plays an indomitable mother striving to secure a steady income and position for her son, Boris Drubetskoy.  She assists Pierre at the death of his father and thwarts efforts to keep a proper will granting him his full inheritance from being read.  So she plays a major role in early episodes.  It's just that the whole thing is so anglicized that there's little effort to make this what it is:  the great Russian epic.

I was so longing for the parts where Natassia and Nikolai quit being annoying little twits.  But now I'm not sure we'll get there.  I was amazed to discover that there were only 2 more episodes since we're really only a short way into the book at episode 4.  Oh well, that's all the budget we have kids, so wrap it up!

EDIT:  It went from bad to worse.  Lily James gave Natassia's character all the gravitas she'd breathed into Lady Rose MacClare in Downton Abbey.  It's hard to really distinguish the two roles, given further reflection.  I guess it's a stroke of good luck that we are fresh out of cream pies.
I recommend that you give this entire production a skip and read the book.  It might take longer, but it's so much better than this lite and laffy version.
60
TV / Movies / Re: Latest Movie You Watched
« Last post by 6pairsofshoes on May 27, 2025, 02:44:08 PM »
I've been on a binge.
1)  Neruda:  Pablo Neruda, the Marxist poet and Senator, is hunted down for about 2 hours by a relentless cop.  He's not the most subtle of guys on the lam, but he's entertaining and people just love him.  The nascent Allende regime is taking a swift turn to the right.  Eh.  I've seen better.

2)  Tom of Finland.  Worth seeing.  Docudrama about gay illustrator.

3)  Sophie Scholl:  The Final Days.  Student activist who, along with her brother, is caught distributing anti Nazi leaflets in 1943.  She's interrogated by guys who seem to think that you get more results by yelling.  Compelling true story.  Nazis were, apparently, not flexible in their politics, nor were they very polite to their critics.  The leaflet in question attacked Hitler's campaign into Russia and it kind of reminds me of Putin's critics who would also be complaining about the stupidity of his attacking Ukraine.  Each would be about as well tolerated by the regime in charge.  At least with Germany, there was light at the end of the tunnel when the Allies came in.  Things have not changed for the better, sadly.

4)  The Princess Bride:  with a stellar cast and considerable wit, a delightful story about true love and its constancy through adversities.

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