Weekend recap 2003/05/02 - 2003/05/05: Iron Chef, X2, Alias Finale
Iron Chef
Friday evening, for our youth group activity night, we had the opportunity to pit the guys against the girls in a friendly-yet-fierce competition of (cue dramatic Japanese-y music) Iron Chef!!! The event began as George (figuratively) whipped the cover off of the ingredient for the competition - the tomato (fruit or vegetable? Who knows?). The girls were well-prepared, as they had been communicating since earlier in the week as to possible recipes, needed cooking implements, and had already purchased up all the ingredients and divvied up the duties for each recipe. The guys, on the other hand, did not have any ingredients nor cooking implements until Mark showed up with the food he was asked to bring, and George made an emergency trip back to his pad to pick up pans and such.
Going back and forth between the two kitchens where each team was busily cleaning, chopping, dicing, boiling, baking, and stir-frying away, it was both neat and amusing to see the different dynamics at play. More than once, a counselor would have to step in to prevent one of the younger kids from slicing off his fingers while he was trying to cut a tomato. Funny moment - the pie crust used by the guys was a bit too large for the filling, so they ended up bunching it up in the pan, taking up the excess slack and in the process making the entire pie look like a gigantic Chinese bao-zhi.
As the designated cooking hour came to a close, the girls cleaned up and presented their four dishes to the judges (myself, George, and Luwen - Mark helped the boys out some so while he joined the rest of the counselors as initial tasters, he didn't get to give scores). As a disclaimer, I don't know the real name for any of these dishes, so I'll just describe what they were:
Girl's Iron Chef Dishes - Four items
1) whole tomatos stuffed with some kind of herbed pasta. Each tomato was hollowed out and stuffed with pasta, then baked. The tops of each tomato (cut off to provide the hole for stuffing) were then placed back on to give each a nifty little "hat".
2) breaded-tomato casserole.
3) angelhair pasta with sauce made with tomato and some ther veggies that are slipping my mind.
4) egg-and-tomato - a college staple. Oh, it's quite popular with those members of the working crowd who can't cook, too.
By the deadline, the boys only had two dishes ready while two more were still in the oven. Eventually the latter two were brought out:
Boys' Iron Chef Dishes - Four items
1) pasta primavera - tomato, corn, celery, carrot, cauliflower, and sausage. Amazingly, they made enough for like 15 servings or more. We needed one of the big aluminum serving trays to contain all of it.
2) tomato soup with celery, olives, and some small bits of pasta
3) tomato-and-cheese pie
4) tomato tart with egg custard
Tasting. I was pleasantly surprised by the dishes provided by both teams. To be frank, before heading to YG on Friday night, I wasn't sure if it was a good idea that I had skipped dinner, but as it turned out, the food was very good. My favorites - from the girls' dishes, the breaded-tomato casserole was excellent - had a good blend of acidity from the tomato that was tempered by some brown sugar in the breading, and from the boys, the soup, which tasted very fresh and had an extra kick from some pepper. By the end of the tasting period, I was quite satisfied.
Judging. I went into the competition fully expecting a rout - heck, I knew that when I was in high school, I couldn't cook a lick. However, while I was anticipating a certain level of proficiency coming from the female team, the creativity and overall resourcefulness of the guys was quite impressive. We judged on the three areas that the real show judges on - presentation, taste, and creativity. Overall, the girls did a better job with presentation (the pasta-stuffed tomatoes were very neat), while the guys scored higher on creativity - no one would expect to get a pie stuffed with tomato, cheese, and mayonnaise mixed with garlic salt (which turned out surprisingly well). Taste was almost a wash. However, the fact that the boys took an extra 40 minutes to finish baking their pie and tart cost them a few points, which ultimately gave the competition to the girls.
Kudos all around to both teams for a fun evening.
X2
Watched X2: X-Men United on Saturday evening with a few folks. I found it quite entertaining, as I was something of a fan of both the comic book (it was best when Jim Lee was doing the pencils) and also of the cartoon series (was that back in high school?). Some thoughts on the movie, click and drag on the following text as there might be a few spoilers:
- Nightcrawler's sequence at the beginning, where he assaults the President in the Oval Office, was way cool. Loved the special effects of him jump-kicking someone, then teleporting while the first victim was flying through the air and then slamming into the next guard. He's one of my favorite characters in the X-Men. I thought they did a pretty good job of bringing out his religious side, which could have come across as corny, but instead it seemed to be mostly in step with the rest of the movie.
- didn't know Professor Xavier's psychic powers were formidable enough to effectively stop time, by taking control of everyone in a general vicinity.
- cameos identified - Colossus, Jubilee, Gambit (Remy LeBeau), Beast (Dr. Henry McCoy), Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde), Siryn. Haven't yet figured out who the little Harry Potter-lookalike is.
- there was a heckuva lot of violence in this movie that wasn't necessarily bloody, but was rather graphic - there are several scenes of Wolverine slicing and piercing people with his claws, Magneto "forcibly" removes the implement for his escape from an unfortunate guard, a bunch of soldiers explode when the safety pins on the grenades they're wearing suddenly fly off, Wolverine and Deathstrike really cut each other up.
- speaking of which (part 1) - the scene where Magneto removes the iron from the guard's blood, then uses it to escape, is probably the second-coolest scene in the movie after the Nightcrawler one. You really start to see just how powerful control over metal can be - you can fire your own bullets, create levitating platforms, and so on.
- speaking of which (part 2) - Lady Deathstrike/Yuriko, played by Kelly Hu, is a wasted character in this movie - totally inaccurate to the comic book (where she's a cyborg with no healing power, and a history with Wolverine). However, her duel with Wolverine at the end of the movie was basically what I was expecting between veteran blade-fighters - for example, it made plenty of sense for her to trap Wolverine on top of a grate so that she could pierce him through it.
- other cool scenes: Nightcrawler teleporting out of the X-jet to grab Rogue, who had been blown out of a hole, and teleporting back into the cabin; Colossus ching-ching-ching transforming to metallic mode in the mansion
Overall, excellent movie entertainment- or should I say, X-cellent? Haha, I'm such a dork. Much better than the first.
Alias Finale
Not sure if I liked the ending. It's a tad weird for the show. The ending to season 1 was somewhat sensical - you could almost sorta see Sydney's mom coming back into the picture. However, ending season 2 with two years vanishing into thin air - it'll be interesting to see what the bigger picture is. Seri has an excellent commentary on her blog page.
Hoops - 7-game series
Thursday night, played some hoops at National Semiconductor with Jason, George, and Peter - the rest of the weekly regulars didn't make it because several forgot to bring their gear, due to the weather. Fortunately, the clouds held their rain, and we got to play a 7-game 2-on-2 series - Jason and George vs. Peter and myself. 'Twas hecka fun... George was hitting almost every shot, and I just tried to use my left hand for everything. We lost the first 2 games on "their court" (their half of the court), then moved "back home" (other side of the court) and won 2, upset them on their court, got upset on our court, and then pulled out the final game on their court by hitting 5 threes. We were yakking it up the whole time too.
Iron Chef
Friday evening, for our youth group activity night, we had the opportunity to pit the guys against the girls in a friendly-yet-fierce competition of (cue dramatic Japanese-y music) Iron Chef!!! The event began as George (figuratively) whipped the cover off of the ingredient for the competition - the tomato (fruit or vegetable? Who knows?). The girls were well-prepared, as they had been communicating since earlier in the week as to possible recipes, needed cooking implements, and had already purchased up all the ingredients and divvied up the duties for each recipe. The guys, on the other hand, did not have any ingredients nor cooking implements until Mark showed up with the food he was asked to bring, and George made an emergency trip back to his pad to pick up pans and such.
Going back and forth between the two kitchens where each team was busily cleaning, chopping, dicing, boiling, baking, and stir-frying away, it was both neat and amusing to see the different dynamics at play. More than once, a counselor would have to step in to prevent one of the younger kids from slicing off his fingers while he was trying to cut a tomato. Funny moment - the pie crust used by the guys was a bit too large for the filling, so they ended up bunching it up in the pan, taking up the excess slack and in the process making the entire pie look like a gigantic Chinese bao-zhi.
As the designated cooking hour came to a close, the girls cleaned up and presented their four dishes to the judges (myself, George, and Luwen - Mark helped the boys out some so while he joined the rest of the counselors as initial tasters, he didn't get to give scores). As a disclaimer, I don't know the real name for any of these dishes, so I'll just describe what they were:
Girl's Iron Chef Dishes - Four items
1) whole tomatos stuffed with some kind of herbed pasta. Each tomato was hollowed out and stuffed with pasta, then baked. The tops of each tomato (cut off to provide the hole for stuffing) were then placed back on to give each a nifty little "hat".
2) breaded-tomato casserole.
3) angelhair pasta with sauce made with tomato and some ther veggies that are slipping my mind.
4) egg-and-tomato - a college staple. Oh, it's quite popular with those members of the working crowd who can't cook, too.
By the deadline, the boys only had two dishes ready while two more were still in the oven. Eventually the latter two were brought out:
Boys' Iron Chef Dishes - Four items
1) pasta primavera - tomato, corn, celery, carrot, cauliflower, and sausage. Amazingly, they made enough for like 15 servings or more. We needed one of the big aluminum serving trays to contain all of it.
2) tomato soup with celery, olives, and some small bits of pasta
3) tomato-and-cheese pie
4) tomato tart with egg custard
Tasting. I was pleasantly surprised by the dishes provided by both teams. To be frank, before heading to YG on Friday night, I wasn't sure if it was a good idea that I had skipped dinner, but as it turned out, the food was very good. My favorites - from the girls' dishes, the breaded-tomato casserole was excellent - had a good blend of acidity from the tomato that was tempered by some brown sugar in the breading, and from the boys, the soup, which tasted very fresh and had an extra kick from some pepper. By the end of the tasting period, I was quite satisfied.
Judging. I went into the competition fully expecting a rout - heck, I knew that when I was in high school, I couldn't cook a lick. However, while I was anticipating a certain level of proficiency coming from the female team, the creativity and overall resourcefulness of the guys was quite impressive. We judged on the three areas that the real show judges on - presentation, taste, and creativity. Overall, the girls did a better job with presentation (the pasta-stuffed tomatoes were very neat), while the guys scored higher on creativity - no one would expect to get a pie stuffed with tomato, cheese, and mayonnaise mixed with garlic salt (which turned out surprisingly well). Taste was almost a wash. However, the fact that the boys took an extra 40 minutes to finish baking their pie and tart cost them a few points, which ultimately gave the competition to the girls.
Kudos all around to both teams for a fun evening.
X2
Watched X2: X-Men United on Saturday evening with a few folks. I found it quite entertaining, as I was something of a fan of both the comic book (it was best when Jim Lee was doing the pencils) and also of the cartoon series (was that back in high school?). Some thoughts on the movie, click and drag on the following text as there might be a few spoilers:
- Nightcrawler's sequence at the beginning, where he assaults the President in the Oval Office, was way cool. Loved the special effects of him jump-kicking someone, then teleporting while the first victim was flying through the air and then slamming into the next guard. He's one of my favorite characters in the X-Men. I thought they did a pretty good job of bringing out his religious side, which could have come across as corny, but instead it seemed to be mostly in step with the rest of the movie.
- didn't know Professor Xavier's psychic powers were formidable enough to effectively stop time, by taking control of everyone in a general vicinity.
- cameos identified - Colossus, Jubilee, Gambit (Remy LeBeau), Beast (Dr. Henry McCoy), Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde), Siryn. Haven't yet figured out who the little Harry Potter-lookalike is.
- there was a heckuva lot of violence in this movie that wasn't necessarily bloody, but was rather graphic - there are several scenes of Wolverine slicing and piercing people with his claws, Magneto "forcibly" removes the implement for his escape from an unfortunate guard, a bunch of soldiers explode when the safety pins on the grenades they're wearing suddenly fly off, Wolverine and Deathstrike really cut each other up.
- speaking of which (part 1) - the scene where Magneto removes the iron from the guard's blood, then uses it to escape, is probably the second-coolest scene in the movie after the Nightcrawler one. You really start to see just how powerful control over metal can be - you can fire your own bullets, create levitating platforms, and so on.
- speaking of which (part 2) - Lady Deathstrike/Yuriko, played by Kelly Hu, is a wasted character in this movie - totally inaccurate to the comic book (where she's a cyborg with no healing power, and a history with Wolverine). However, her duel with Wolverine at the end of the movie was basically what I was expecting between veteran blade-fighters - for example, it made plenty of sense for her to trap Wolverine on top of a grate so that she could pierce him through it.
- other cool scenes: Nightcrawler teleporting out of the X-jet to grab Rogue, who had been blown out of a hole, and teleporting back into the cabin; Colossus ching-ching-ching transforming to metallic mode in the mansion
Overall, excellent movie entertainment- or should I say, X-cellent? Haha, I'm such a dork. Much better than the first.
Alias Finale
Not sure if I liked the ending. It's a tad weird for the show. The ending to season 1 was somewhat sensical - you could almost sorta see Sydney's mom coming back into the picture. However, ending season 2 with two years vanishing into thin air - it'll be interesting to see what the bigger picture is. Seri has an excellent commentary on her blog page.
Hoops - 7-game series
Thursday night, played some hoops at National Semiconductor with Jason, George, and Peter - the rest of the weekly regulars didn't make it because several forgot to bring their gear, due to the weather. Fortunately, the clouds held their rain, and we got to play a 7-game 2-on-2 series - Jason and George vs. Peter and myself. 'Twas hecka fun... George was hitting almost every shot, and I just tried to use my left hand for everything. We lost the first 2 games on "their court" (their half of the court), then moved "back home" (other side of the court) and won 2, upset them on their court, got upset on our court, and then pulled out the final game on their court by hitting 5 threes. We were yakking it up the whole time too.
posted by Bob at
2:12 AM
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