Salt and Pepper Shrimp with Summer Vegetables

I came home from a short vacation and was greeted by a marvelous Chinese banquet made by my spouse and our youngest son. Yum!

1 lb. shrimp
1 Tbsp. Shaoxing wine
1/2 tsp. salt
3 Tbsp. corn starch
2 Tbsp. Toasted Salt and Peppercorns*
3-4 c. corn
1 bell pepper, sliced
1 jalapeno, sliced
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
2" piece of ginger, minced
2 scallions, sliced

Put peeled shrimp in a bowl with wine and salt.  Let sit for 20 minutes.  Drain and pat dry.  Toss with corn starch and 1 Tbsp. toasted salt and peppercorns.
Heat 1" canola oil in a pan.  Shake off shrimp and place in oil.  Cook 2-3 minutes, and remove.
In wok, add small amount of oil and heat, then stir fry corn, peppers, garlic, ginger and scallions, and 1 Tbsp. toasted salt and peppercorns. Add shrimp back in and toss until reheated.  Serve.

*Toasted Salt and Peppercorns
1/4 c. kosher salt
1/4 c. Sichuan peppercorns
1 Tbsp. black peppercorns
1 Tbsp. white peppercorns

Combone in a skillet over medium heat, toast until peppercorns are popping and smelling up the air, about 10-12 minutes. Let cool and then grind to a fine texture with either a spice grinder of a mortar and pestle.

The Happy Time Murders (2018)

First and foremost, this is not a good movie, and while there are tons of puppets, which requires a level of technical skill to pull off, it is definitely not a movie for children.  Language so foul.
The movie isn’t so much interested in immersing you in a comedic world so much as it is in having its puppets do the most outrageous things you’ve never seen or heard puppets do in a movie. The plot is athat empty. Puppet P.I. Phil gets thrown a case by femme fatale Sandra and soon, wherever he goes, another cast member of a once-famous puppet TV show gets the stuffing blown out of him/her. Turns out Phil was once a cop and the new string of murders puts him back together with his human partner, Connie (Melissa McCarthy).  One doesn’t need to concern oneself too much with plot, what with all the puppet antics. They begin with the foul language, but in due time, we see puppets whose forms are pretty familiar—fluffy bunnies, frisky doggies, a porn shop proprietor doing generally unexpected things, like flashing pubic hair and ejaculating. Is this funny? Absolutely not.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

The book consists largely, but not solely of reading someone else’s private letters, which feels as intrusive as spying on them through an open window. The letters also provide hints into the relationship between the two people, and digging into a whole trove of letters sent over the course of several years can reveal intricacies that face-to-face interaction with the authors never would.
The book follows the wrongful imprisonment of a young black man named Roy, and its impact on him and on his new wife Celestial. There is a third narrator, Andre, a childhood friend of Celestial’s and a college friend of Roy’s. The variation in these perspectives serves an important purpose: It offers up myriad means of understanding the novel’s complicated central relationship, and lets every character speak for themselves.  Celestial is faithful to Roy at first but her devotion to a man she barely knows wanes over time.  Her father, who was very lukewarm on her marriage to Roy, is furious at her for abandoning him when he was incarcerated for being black.  The book is beautifully written and gives the reader a glimmer into the realities of life for people of color in America.

Salmon with Fennel, Cilantro, and Sesame Oil

There was an article about the best cookbooks emerging this spring, and Double Awesome Chinese Food got my immediate attention.
This is a great way to have salmon, and you could use another firm fish if you lived some place closer to the ocean than I do.

1 1/2 lbs. salmon, cut into individual portions
1-2 fennel bulbs, msndolined
1/4 c. fennel fronds, chopped
1/4 c. sesame oil
1 shallot, chopped
1/4 c. cilantro, chopped
1/2 inch piece of ginger, minced
1 Tbsp.  rice vinegar
1/4 tsp. each of salt and pepper

Preheat oven the 350 degrees.
Put the fennel slices in a roasting pan large enough to fit the fish in a single layer.  Drizzle with 2 Tbsp. sesame oil and pinch of salt.  Bake for 20 minutes.
While that is happening, put fennel fronds, cilantro, ginger, shallot, vinegar and the remaining salt, pepper, and sesame oil in a food processor and pulse to combine.
Place fish on fennel skin side facing down, and spread the sauce evenly across the top of the fish.  Bake an additional 15-20 minutes.

The ABC Murders (2019)

This new three part series on Amazon Prime is something to behold.  The most memorable aspect of the remake of this Agatha Christie classic is Poirot himself.  Unlike the mincing perfection of David Suchet's Poirot and the badass Poirot of Kenneth Branagh, John Malkovich's Poirot is sad in the traditional sense of anger turned inward.  He is constantly disappointed in what man will do to man.  He is still Belgian, but he has frequent flashbacks to the German invasion of Belgium in WWI and his evacuation to England soon thereafter.
The plot is unchanged from the original book in terms of who done it, how, and why.  Inspector Japp is replaced by a not so young looking Inspector Crone (played by Rupert Grint of Ron Weasley fame,  Do not worry, you will not have flashbacks to his best known role, he is completely changed), and he and Poirot gain in trust as the murders continue and they close in on catching the killer.  This is well worth seeing, and I like this Poirot a lot.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamen

This book was recommended to me while waiting for a meeting to start, a coworker gave an impromptu pitch for this book, which he was reading at the time, and then several people around the table echoed his enthusiasm for the book.  So rather than my usual approach, which is to read about a book and then getting it, this was a crowd sourced option.
The core question is that if you knew the day you were going to die, how would you live your life?
The four Gold siblings sneak out one hot and sweltering summer days and saw a fortune teller.  She gave each child the date of their death.  Set aside how telling a seven year old that they will die incredibly young might adversely affect their childhood, it is a good hook.  The two younger children know that they will die young, and they make life choices that are a direct result of the fortune telling, whereas the elder two ignore it, and are incredibly unsupportive of their sibling's choices to be more selfish about their life choices.  The book moves forward focusing on the first to dies, and then the second and so on.  It is a very effective story-telling technique, and I loved this book from the very beginning, and finished it quickly because I had trouble putting it down.

Calligraphy as Art

When I was in Zhangye, in the Gansu Province in northwest China, I saw men in a large open square practicing calligraphy.  They used broomstick length pieces of wood with a tip that is covered with a cloth that is then dipped in a liquid to create temporary calligraphy.  When talking with my nephew, who is living in the province, he said that usually people are reproducing famous poems.  In China, from a very early period, calligraphy has been seen as not only a decorative art form, but rather as a supreme visual art form.  The use of calligraphy on oracle bones dates back to at least 1000 BCE.  Some of the most famous paintings in ancient China have both drawing and calligraphy as equal components to the piece.  Alongside calligraphy, poetry is also a highly valued art form, so combining them is a high form of art, which can be practiced by ordinary citizens.  It is a mesmerizing thing to watch, and I think indicative of the culture.

Chicken with Plums (2011)

This movie has an oddness about the story telling, somewhere between Wes Anderson and traditional Persian story telling.

The film, named for a traditional Persian dish, is a grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin — not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.  The film begins in Tehran in 1958, when the shah ruled a secular Iran not yet ruled by Islamic fundamentalism. Little is made of politics in the film, and still less of religion; it is all told through the soulful eyes of a master violinist named Nasser Ali.  

The setting is unusual, the story telling unique, but the story is very familiar.  Nasser falls in love with Iran, she with he, her father will not allow her to marry him, and Nasser's family pressured him into a loveless marriage with a woman who doesn't understand his passion for music.  She commits an act that plunges him into a deep depression, and we comes to see the whole sad story as the sum of the parts.  Unusual, but ultimately well worth watching.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

This is a masterpiece of Russian magical realism, and I had never heard of it.  The author lived through the Russian Revolution and Stalin, writing this book over a decade, and asking his wife to essentially hide it upon his death in 1940.  It wasn't until the 1960's that it was published in any form, and this 50th anniversary version is wonderfully annotated so that those of us who know very little Russian history and influences can follow along.
And what a ride it is.  The novel spans several spring days in 1930s Moscow during which the capital is visited by the Devil himself, trailed by a piebald entourage including an easily insulted giant cat with a fondness for vodka and guns. Registering himself as a foreign artist who specializies in black magic, Woland (as the novel’s Devil is known) proceeds to expose, via a series of séances, the greed and servility that rules even socialist Moscow. But this is a warm-up. Half way through the novel we discover that Woland is in ­Moscow for Margarita, an unhappily married woman who once loved the Master, the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate’s consignment of Christ to the cross, chapters of which appear in Bulgakov’s novel. The Master burned most of the manuscript after it was turned down by a publisher and committed himself to a mental asylum. At Woland’s invitation, Margarita goes through hell — literally — to search for her beloved, and comes back.  It is even more convoluted than this, I am just giving a feel for this.

Flying Horse of Gansu

It was created in the Eastern Han dynasty about 25 - 220 AD and resides today in the Gansu Provincial Museum, and it is really breath taking to behold.
This outstanding bronze horse has become an iconic emblem of China, used in tourism ads.  Racing through the skies, it treads on a swallow (base of statue, completely out of proportion to the horse) that looks up in amazement. Unlike Pegasus, the Western flying horse, the wingless Han steed is meant to be understood metaphorically rather than literally; it represents an ideal horse that can gallop so fast that it seems to outrun the wind.  The sculpture is perfectly balanced on only one hoof, to complete the illusion of flight.
It was discovered in a three-chambered tomb which had apparently been entered by looters soon after the original burial some 2,000 years earlier. The looters had not, however, entered the chamber in which the bronzes were found. Archaeologists determined that the opulent tomb was that of a Han dynasty army general who had been given the important task of maintaining imperial frontier defenses on the all important Hexi Corridor of the fascinating Silk Road.