1. I'll begin in the middle. Debbie, Christy, Carol, Paul, Cosette, Taylor, Saphire, Molly, Zoe, and our next door neighbor Jane all piled into Carol and Paul's house for this year's Christmas dinner featuring the cuisine of another country. I might have mentioned before on this blog that every year Carol picks a different country, researches Christmas dinners/traditions of that country, and assigns each of us something to prepare for the meal.
This year Carol decided we'd enjoy a Canadian Christmas dinner and, once she started researching, she narrowed it to a French Canadian dinner called a Reveillon, and we prepared our family's version of a Reveillon (which you can read more about here).
Our Reveillon started with Zoe's contribution, perfectly baked homemade baguettes and Creton, a spicy pork pate.
Paul made mulled wine to help get our Reveillon going.
We moved to the dining table where each of us had a Christmas Cracker at our assigned place and we opened them and put on our crowns. Some family members shared jokes found inside the Cracker and most of us contemplated what we would do with the other little prize also inside.
Then we got down to the business of enjoying the main course of our meal.
Everything centered around the Tourtiere Tart (meat pie) Carol baked.
We opened with a cup of the pea soup I made.
We cut the flaky crusted pork and potato and onion Tourtiere into slices for each of our plates, served ourselves the perfectly prepared Buttered Root Vegetables (carrot, turnip, rutabaga) Cosette and Taylor fixed, and enjoyed Debbie's really tasty Quick Pickles with quatre spices.
We further enhanced our meal with wine, a bottle of red and one of white.
Once we had leisurely eaten the main course, we retired to the living room for a double, possibly a triple dessert.
Christy brought a Maple Yule Log. It was sponge cake rolled up with maple infused whipping cream inside and on the log's surface. It was a visual delight and tasted very good.
Jane baked a batch of small buttered tarts filled with delicious raisin brown sugary filling.
As an added bonus, Molly made a batch of hot buttered rum batter and some of us had a hot drink with our dessert.
What a great Christmas dinner! We had a lot of fun and everyone's contributions were superb.
2. I decided to relax with a couple of movies today, one before dinner and another when we arrived home.
I can't imagine watching two movies more different from each other.
I watched a Christmas-y screwball comedy in the afternoon and a deep, dark, unsettling film noir in the evening.
I started with Christmas in Connecticut (1945), featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan. It's a madcap story about a women's magazine writer, played by Stanwyck, who writes monthly articles about her life on a Connecticut farm and the meals she prepares, how she cares for her baby, and other things. What none of her readers (or her publisher) knows is that this writer lives in Manhattan, can't cook, is single, and has no children.
Well, the magazine's publisher invites a soldier recently rescued at sea after spending two weeks on a life raft and himself to the fictional farm.
Out of this turn of events a fast-paced and hilarious story unfolds as Stanwyck's character, with help from others, works to keep a charade going that she does live on a farm.
I'll leave it at that.
It was a fun way to get ready for our family's gathering today.
3. After returning home from dinner, I watched Force of Evil, a 1948 film noir featuring John Garfield and directed by Abraham Polonsky -- and, by the way, it was produced by Enterprise Productions, Garfield's independent production company.
Polonsky also had a strong hand in writing this movie's poetic screenplay, an adaptation of Ira Wolfert's novel, Tucker's People.
It's a movie about Joe Morse (played by Garfield), a lawyer eager to become a millionaire, and how he aligns himself with a kingpin of organized crime and involves himself in a scam that will result in his boss taking over the entire numbers racket in New York City.
But Joe Morse's brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), is a small time banker in the numbers racket and the scheme Joe Morse gets involved with will bankrupt his brother.
So, where does Joe Morse's loyalty lie? As the movie explores this question, it also explores the amorality of capitalism, what, if anything, makes a human life meaningful, and peers deeply into the very nature of evil itself.
After I watched Force of Evil, I read Eddie Muller's comments about the movie and listened to his intro and outro from when Noir Alley featured the movie. I also listened to an intro by Sydney Pollack and I read several other reviews of the movie and came to understand much more deeply how and why this movie has been so influential, especially for Martin Scorsese.
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