1. For tonight's family dinner, Carol assigned me to make, in her words, a leafy autumn salad. I wasn't quite sure what to make of her request, so I jumped on the World Wide Web, performed a search using the words, "leafy autumn salad" and some recipes came up. Well, I like some things about some of the recipes and other things about others, but no single recipe stood out to me.
So I borrowed from two or three of the recipes and did the following: First, I put seven or eight slices of bacon on our stovetop grill and cooked them at a medium low temperature to keep grease from splattering until they were crisp . While the bacon fried, I chopped about two and half heads of Romaine lettuce, chopped two apples, and opened packages of toffeed pecans and dried cranberries. I combined them in a bowl and broke up the now cooled of bacon slices, added them, and tossed the salad. I then combined the juice of two lemons with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, two cloves of garlic, salt, and pepper. My hope was that this vinaigrette would be acidic and complement the sweetness of the salad's apples, cranberries, and toffeed pecans. I think it did.
2. Tonight's dinner started on Carol and Paul's patio. Molly heated up puff pastries topped with goat cheese and a cranberry mixture. Carol served us each a spiced rum Dark and Stormy and we yakked for a while before moving to the dining table indoors.
Carol prepared a chuck roast with potatoes, carrots, and onions in her slow cooker and Christy contributed two bottles of wine she purchased at Trader Joe's. It was a simple and comforting dinner, pot roast and the autumn salad and the wine.
For dessert, Carol made a delicious pear crisp.
Debbie had had a tiring day at school -- nothing too far out of the ordinary, but she was ready to get home and go to bed soon after we finished dessert and so we took off. We didn't see Paul tonight because he's in rehearsal for an upcoming play being performed in Wallace in November.
3. When I watch scenes from The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, I'm always drawn in by the actors who play small supporting roles. For example, I'm intrigued by Joe Spinell who plays Willi Cici, a driver and security guy for Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather, Part II. Today, while watching the scene Cici gets shot in, I suddenly wanted to remember what other popular movie Joe Spinell had played in.
I looked it up and, right!, he was in Rocky. He played the part of Gazzo, the loan shark. Rocky worked as a collector for Gazzo and Gazzo turns out to be one of his chief supporters when Rocky decides to accept the challenge of taking on Apollo Creed.
So I watched clips from Rocky and it came back to me why Gazzo had been memorable to me. He's a loan shark in a soulless business who turns out, in his relationship with Rocky, to be a better guy than his profession might have led us to believe he'd be.
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