1. In the fall of 2014, we were living in Greenbelt, MD, Debbie was teaching at the French Immersion school there, and I was completely finished with teaching, having taught part-time for two school years after retiring in 2012.
In Greenbelt, I took charge of fixing our evening dinners. Yes, sometimes we ate out, especially at the now shuttered Old Line Bistro in Beltsville, but often I prepared our dinners and we ate at home.
I'm reassuming that role now that Debbie is teaching full time again. Ha! I have some rust to shake off.
Today, I went to Yoke's to pick up a few things and checked out the chicken counter. I was thrilled to find that Yoke's was carrying packages of chicken wingettes.
Since moving to Kellogg, I haven't fixed Buffalo wings often.
Once home, I looked back at my blog to remind myself how I'd prepared wings in the past and I looked up a recipe at the Frank's Hot Sauce website.
I melted a third of a cup of butter and added a half a cup of Frank's Hot Sauce to it. I had my sauce.
Then I couldn't remember if, in the past, I fried the floured chicken pieces and then dipped them in the sauce or if I dipped them in the sauce before frying.
Well, I decided they'd taste good either way, so I floured them, dipped them in the butter and sauce, and then fried them it butter.
It worked.
It also came back to me that I used to fry the pieces first and then dip them in sauce, put them in a bowl, and pour the excess sauce over them, and toss them.
I'll do it that way next time.
My approach worked. Tonight's chicken wings were delicious. So were the roasted cauliflower, Yukon golds, and Walla Walla Sweet Onions I fixed to go with them. We had rice leftover from last night's dinner and I poured off some of the butter, chicken fat, and hot sauce still in the skillet from frying the wings, but kept a thin layer in the pan and warmed up the rice in the butter, fat, and sauce.
That was a smart move.
Not only was our dinner satisfying, but, as is my habit now, I prepared enough food so that Debbie had plenty to pack in her lunch for Thursday.
2. Over on ZOOM, Diane, Bill, and I have talked several times about our dissatisfaction with Hollywood publicists and with publications that focus on the off-screen lives and sex appeal of actors.
I bring this up because, until recently, most of my experience with Bette Davis has been shaped by the stories that never seem to die about her alleged feud with Joan Crawford, her four marriages, her conflicts with Warner Brothers, and her penchant for unvarnished honesty about anything she talks about.
Lost in all of this attention to off-screen stuff is the fact that Bette Davis was a superb actor.
After watching her in Dead Ringer (1964), I decided to watch her in Dangerous (1935), knowing she won the Academy Award as Best Actress for her performance as the alcoholic, self-destructive, but infinitely talented actress, Joyce Heath.
Bette Davis astounded me in this role. Joyce Heath is character of many moods and they change in split seconds. She's brash, bitter, vulnerable, lustful, witty, reckless, worldly wise, naive, seductive, cold, off-putting, calculating, spontaneous, and immeasurably talented as an actress on the skids.
Bette Davis plays these flash changes in personality brilliantly not only in her face, but with her great skill as a physical actor, integrating the movements of her body with the emotional demands of each moment in the movie.
Dangerous is a wild melodrama replete with highly charged emotions throughout the story and packed with intense conflict between and within its lead characters.
Bette Davis' Joyce Heath is at the center of the turmoil in this story and I cannot imagine any other actor playing this role so perfectly.
3. Under normal conditions, I would have been ready to call it a night when Dangerous came to an end.
For me, however, these are not normal times.
My sleep patterns are out of whack -- I'm off my usual early to bed, early to rise pattern.
Knowing I'd be up later than usual, I flipped on the next episode of the second season of Columbo.
It was a hoot.
Columbo investigates the death of an accomplished winery owner's half brother.
To get the job done, Columbo throws himself into a crash course to study the finer points of wine, its production, and its storage.
He's up against a formidable opponent. Donald Pleasance plays the wine connoisseur whose half brother appears to have died in a scuba diving accident. His character and Columbo develop a respectful rapport with each other that is fun to watch as Columbo methodically gets to the bottom of how the victim came to lose his life.
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