Disney's Big Hero 6

I have been a bit delayed in writing about this movie as I just haven't had the inspiration to write about, but I will just force myself to put together something right now, as they farther away I get from the movie the less I remember.

I really liked this movie. Going in I really didn't know what to expect from the movie, but it is another great Disney animated movie. This was yet another movie that made me tear up, and actually a few times, I am either getting more emotional as a person or movies are just hitting me in the feels more often, or possibly both.

This movie takes place in a futuristic city called San Fransokyo, I think that is how it is spelled at least, but the city has elements of both San Francisco and Tokyo, and I really liked the slightly futuristic feel of the movie. I thought the city was really well put together.

The main character, Hiro, is a classic type, the genius who just isn't applying himself in his life, while his older brother is trying to set him down the right path. This movie really makes studying sciences look cool, which is always a good message to send to kids. Many of the characters have their own specific creations that they are working on at the school they all attend. There is also a clash between the public sector school and the private sector in the shape of a businessman. While the science is slightly futuristic, it is also very believable. It isn't out there to the extreme, there are many things that could be quite possible in the near future.

The character who makes this movie in so many different ways is Baymax, an inflatable non-threatening robotic nurse. Baymax provides the movie with both comedy as well as heart. There are many themes in the movie including dealing with loss in your life,  and finding your true calling in life.

This movie is quite unlike other Disney movies, it provides great action shots, there is heart, there is humor. I think it is more comparable to How To Train Your Dragon in tone than other Disney movies.

I highly reccomend this movie, like all of the other movies that I have seen this year. This is especially great if you have kids in the right age range. We may be living in a real golden age of animated films, because there are so many wonderful animated films coming out these days. This will be the 3rd that I have loved this year alone, counting Lego Movie which is  a big different animation-wise.

This movie was really hard to slot in my rankings this year, I have loved all of the movies this year, and will likely own all of them in the near future. I would like to see this movie again, and parts of it have really stuck with me.

2014 Movie Rankings:
1. Guardians of the Galaxy
2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
3. How To Train Your Dragon 2
4. Big Hero 6
5. 22 Jump Street
6. X-Men: Days of Future Past
7. The Lego Movie

What I Am Thankful For

I just wanted to take some time to write about all of the things that I am thankful for, and also share the food I have made for Thanksgiving. This is not an all inclusive list, but I just wanted to share some things.

I am thankful for all of my friends and family.
I am thankful that I am living a financially stable life, I never knew how wonderful being financially stable was until I actually was stable.
I am thankful for my job, which I look forward to every day.
I am thankful for my dependable car, after dealing with lots of crap from my previous car, it is nice to have a car that I don't need to worry about.
I am thankful for my love of cooking, which I believe I inherited from my family, I enjoy cooking and trying to make new things frequently.
I am thankful that the value of learning was instilled in me as a kid, we would go to museums and zoos to learn about all sorts of things, and this has stayed with me to this day, I still enjoy learning new things whenever I can.
I am thankful for my health.
And last but not least I am thankful for my wonderful cat Astrid who I adopted a few months ago, she has been a wonderful addition to my life. For those who haven't seen here, this is what she was doing while I was cooking today.

She slept like that til I gave her some food, she then immediately got up and ate.

This is my Thanksgiving dinner, roast turkey breast, chorizo brown rice dressing, brussels sprouts with bacon, apple, onion, cream, and parmesan cheese, and some cilantro lime corn with garlic butter.

I brined the turkey breast overnight, which made it nice and juicy. All of the different elements worked so well together, I was surprised by how much I loved the brussels sprouts dish, but I wanted to try some new things and it all worked well.

For dessert I made some apple crisp which I had some vanilla frozen yogurt with. It was a good end to a great meal.

I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Peter's Cooking Diary #26

Well it has been a little while since I have written about my cooking, I honestly haven't been doing that much cooking, or at least not that much of cooking new things. This week I cooked 2 new things, or at least variations of things that I had never done before.

The first recipe that I will be making this week is slow cooker chicken meatloaf. I have made chicken and turkey meatloaf in the oven previously but I have never made either of them in the slow cooker before. I took a recipe for a tex mex meatloaf in the slow cooker with beef and changed it over to chicken. I had forgotten to get the beef I had originally planned to use out of the freezer the night before, so I made a dash to the store where they actually had ground chicken on sale for an amazing price, so I went with that.

One of the things that I love about my favorite slow cooker cookbook does is that it includes different methods for using the slow cooker. In this case the foil collar will help to diffuse the heat a little bit from the heating element and move it all around the insert.

After the collar, you add strips of aluminum foil going perpendicular to each other to help with removing the meatloaf from the crock pot intact and it also helps prevent the meatloaf from burning to the insert, and it even helps with the cleanup afterwards.

This is the selections of produce that I am using for this recipe, I want to start doing more before shots of things. Those are poblano pepper for people that are not familiar with them, they are a little spicy with what I consider to be better flavor than green bell peppers. The recipe called for a red bell pepper but of course I don't stick to a recipe perfectly. The garlic cloves are the last of what I got from my mom about a month ago.

Chopped up onion and peppers in the big container and the garlic in the other.

The recipe called for vegetable oil, but what better fat is there to use for this than bacon grease? I cooked the pepper and onions in a pan for about 10 minutes on medium high heat before adding the garlic.

Stirred the garlic in with everything else, and cooked for about 5 more minutes.

Added the seasoning of salt, chile powder, and dried oregano as well as some tomato paste, stirred all of the ingredients together.

This is what the veggies looked like all together after cooking. I let them all cool and worked on the other elements of the meatloaf.

This bowl contains one soft kaiser roll torn into little bits, one cup of milk, and one can's worth of beans that I rinsed and drained. I mashed them all together in this bowl until the mixture almost looked like blue milk.

The bowl of mashed up milk, beans, and bread, alongside the ground chicken in its own bowl, I let it get a little bit warmer than fridge temp so my hands wouldn't freeze when I mixed it all together.

The chicken bowl to which I added the milk/bean mixture, cheese, corn, eggs, and the veggie mixture.

Mixing the whole thing together, it is a messy job, but I don't mind it at all.

I added the meatloaf to the slow cooker and evened it out. After this picture I added a layer of barbecue sauce to the top of this, I put the lid on and cooked it for about 5 hours on low.

This is what it looks like once the meatloaf was done, then you take the pieces of foil sticking out and pull them all together and you can lift the meatloaf out. I actually let it cool down a bit before removing it from the pot.

The other recipe I made this week, is something that I had never made this way. I have made roasted cauliflower in many different ways, but this one was actually brown butter roasted cauliflower. To start I preheated the oven to 425. I removed the stems and leaves from the heads. I then rubbed them with vegetable oil and stuck them into the oven to bake for 45 minutes.

After the 45 minutes in the oven, the recipe called for butter to be smeared all over both of the heads, I did this as best I could as they were hot. I then popped the cauliflower back into the oven.

During the last stage of cooking I took the cauliflower out and basted it with the browned butter that was in the pan. This made the cauliflower taste amazing overall, my favorite preparation yet!

Life update: 9/20/2014

It has been quite a while since I have written anything on here, and even longer since I have written about my life. I have honestly been trying to get out there and live life, I do miss writing though so maybe I will get back to doing it on a more regular basis. Honestly, this post is more about me venting about some things to try to get them out of my head.

I have been doing quite well for the most part, there have been a few hiccups with my depression, but they only lasted for a few days at a time. I have been getting out there and dating, and meeting new people some, which is something I really would like to do more of in my life. I need to find ways to get a little bit out of my comfort zone to meet people.

On the dating front I have dated a few people over the past few months, nothing really developed in a long term way for different reasons along the way. I have actually deleted all of my dating site accounts because someone  was accessing them and messaging people and blocking other people who I had messaged. I changed my password on every account a few times and even on my email address a few times. I just decided it wasn't worth the hassle to deal with. I will likely go back to them in the future, but we will see, I am honestly very tired of dating.

For those of you reading this who might not know me personally, I am a very logical person. I think my downfall will be wanting to understand things that I don't need to. Its the things that I don't control that I have the hardest times with. Back in April I was dating someone, honestly it was only for a few weeks, things could not have gone better, fluid conversation, chemistry on any level, I felt like we actually got each other, then one day she stops talking to me, a few days later she tells me she isn't over her ex and didn't want to be my friend or anything. I understand it, it just blindsided me. She didn't want to talk to me or try to be my friend or anything. I have honestly still not moved on emotionally. I really thought that I had, but I randomly ran into her, and the hurt and pain flared up completely, I have just been down the last few days since that. I just never learned how to let things go, and I really, really want to.

I need to learn how to let things go, and I need to learn how to cut myself a break. I need to learn to accept things as they are when I have no control over these things, especially in the case described above. I need to not beat myself up for things that are out of my control as well. I swear when my emotions get in the way I always wish there was an easy logical way to deal with them, but that isn't how emotions work is it?

I have not had much alone time in the last few months because I have been letting a friend of mine sleep on my couch pretty regularly, because she doesn't really have anywhere else to go, but I really miss my alone time. I really like alone time, it was once my worst nightmare, but I have learned to really enjoy my alone time, it can be very therapeutic.

I have been wanting to get some kind of pet in my apartment, I need to look into exactly how much extra it would cost to do that, because I think that will help me better deal with my loneliness, I would like to get a cat, but I am not sure if they are allowed in my building or not. If I get a pet, I will be sure to post about him/her on here on occasion and post some pictures.

I honestly just needed to vent about some things, I don't really expect to accomplish anything by writing about all of this, but I know for me it does help to get it out of my head at the very least.

Guardians of the Galaxy

This movie, oh man, this movie was a bit different than I was expecting, which I think was a good thing. In all honesty, I didn't know what to expect from this movie, but it did things that were quite wonderful. It is probably for the best that Marvel had waited until the end of their 2nd phase of movies to release this movie, it is based on a comic, but I honestly had no previous knowledge of the characters, although I did recently get a copy of the first Rocket Raccoon, I just haven't read it yet.

This movie does something that none of the Marvel movies to date had done by including lots of music, and I thought the music was very well selected as well, a list of the tracks can be found here. The music is a lot of 70's pop music, and I think the combination would be something that my mom would really like getting and listening to. None of the other Marvel movies have more than maybe one of two songs within them, and there are 5-10 songs played in part during the movie. I thought the music and the reasons it was so prominent helped the story and motivation within the movie.

This movie has been called the funniest Marvel movie in ads, and also on Rotten Tomatoes I will say that this could not be more true! Other Marvel movies have had humor in them, but this movie really has humor through the entire movie. There are so many good laughs, even within the action and fight scenes. This movie has such a wonderful sense of humor, but just because it is funny doesn't mean this movie doesn't also have heart. There is some sadness in this movie, in fact there is sadness in the movie for each of the main characters, some more than others, but some of them have extremely tragic moments in the movie. I was close to crying in this movie a few different times, that is just something I would not have expected from the funniest movie in the Marvel world.

I must say that this movie should be a launching platform for James Gunn the director. He has already done 2 movies that I own and love, the Dawn of the Dead remake, and also the scifi horror movie Slither, but this will likely enable him to make other studio films, that is if he wants to. Marvel announced that there would be a second Guardians movie even before the first one was released, and the movie beat projections by more than $20 million, which is crazy from a lesser known comic.

This movie was just so much fun, there really isn't much wasted time, and the pacing is fast, but just the right speed to allow the brain to follow everything that was going on. All of the characters have their moments, and also all of the characters are funny in their own way. The movie is extremely well written, with lots of funny jokes, each of the characters have their own personality which is more than can be said for some other comic book movies.

I don't think that there is a weak link in this cast. The 5 main characters are all amazing. Vin Diesel as Groot is great even though he has a limited vocabulary. I wouldn't have known that Rocket was played by Bradley Cooper from the voice, but he did such a wonderful job in that role. Chris Pratt is well on his way to being a star with 2 awesome movies out this year, and he will also be the lead in Jurassic World coming out next summer. There are also many wonderful actors in smaller roles including academy award nominees Glenn Close, John C. Reilly, and Djimon Hounsou, as well as one winner in Benicio Del Toro. Also for all of the Whovians out there we have Karen Gillan is also in the movie, with lots of makeup and prosthetics.

The movie has some wonderful 80's references in it, and it also makes fun of it self at times, such as when something convenient happens to help advance the plot. They also make fun of the fact that Groot only says "I am Groot" which is wonderful when it happens in the movie.

Because there is already a sequel in the works, I have a strong feeling that a lot of the things introduced in this movie will come back in the sequel. There are some lines that hint at more, but there so many of them it is hard to know exactly which direction the series will go. There is also the possibility of a crossover as sometimes in the comics some other marvel characters fight alongside the Guardians.

One thing that sets this apart from the other Marvel Studios movies is that these characters are not really superheroes. They are more along the lines of a ragtag group of losers than superheroes. I really look forward to where the movies go in the future, and I will gladly pay money to see the next movie.

This year has been wonderful for movies for me, I will likely buy all of the movies I have seen today, and that says a lot because I don't buy many movies anymore. This movie was just so engaging and moved at a wonderful pace that it just flew by. I have seen it twice and will gladly go see it again. Because of all of these things I had to rank it first for the year, and it is hard to imagine a movie beating it, but we will see.
2014 Movie Rankings:
1. Guardians of the Galaxy
2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
3. How To Train Your Dragon 2
4. 22 Jump Street
5. X-Men: Days of Future Past
6. The Lego Movie


Rankings of the Avengers Movies:
1. Guardians of the Galaxy
2. The Avengers
3. Iron Man
4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
5. Captain America
6. Iron Man 3
7. Thor
8. The Incredible Hulk
9. Thor: The Dark World
10. Iron Man 2

22 Jump Street

Holy shit this movie was awesome, I think it actually outdid the first movie, and I quite enjoyed the first one. This movie earned my love early on when they had an open and blatant discussion about how sequels are never as good as the originals. I really enjoyed the self awareness and the meta moments in the movie.

The movie was a parody of action movie sequels while also being a great sequel to the first movie. I really thought the writing in this movie was really well done. Lots of the background things are jokes in themselves, such as the cadence the quarterback is calling out includes the words color and number in the actual cadence not colors of numbers. The movie also pokes fun at the buddy cop genre a bit, and their needing to make it clear that the people aren't gay repeatedly, the movie version of saying no homo. Someone in the movie says in Ice Cube's presence "that looks like a giant ice cube." There were also jokes in the movie about how they had double the budget, and also commentary about how they were running low on the budget.

The movie was able to have some quality action like the first movie, but also had many huge laughs. I actually teared up a few times from crying in this movie, and I guarantee that I missed some of the jokes from the movie because I was still laughing at the previous jokes. I will need to watch the movie again to get more of the jokes and possible background gags.

I don't want to give away any of the details twists and turns in the movie, I will say that some are much more predictable than others. I called one of them out right away, but one of the others was a little less obvious to me.

I think that all of the performances in this movie are quite entertaining, they even brought back some randoms from the first movie that you wouldn't have thought would be back in this one. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in particular really take over the movie, and Ice Cube is great in his scenes again.

I will say all of these positive things about the movie, but everyone should know what they are getting into, there are many low brow jokes in this movie. It is quite the entertaining movie, but it really isn't a high minded movie at all. If you saw the first movie, you will know what to expect from for the level of humor in this movie. There are a few call backs to the first movie, including a covalent bonds mention.

All in all I had to rank this movie in the middle of the pack of the movies I have seen this year, I would honestly see any of these movies in the theaters again. It has been a good year all around for movies when I didn't think there would be that many that I would like. I would rate all of these movies as a B or higher on a grading scale, now coming up I might see the new Transformers movie, but it depends on where the rotten tomatoes rating lies.

2014 Movie Rankings:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2. How To Train Your Dragon 2
3. 22 Jump Street
4. X-Men: Days of Future Past
5. The Lego Movie

How to Train your Dragon 2

Wow, this movie really hit the feels hard! It was honestly a movie that would be wonderful to have seen with your father over this past father's day weekend. I was really excited for this movie for a few reasons, first I really enjoyed the first movie, it ranks up there as one of my favorite animated movies, I liked the performances, I liked the story, I liked the visuals. Second, they took their time with this movie as a sequel. Nothing is worse than a studio rushing a sequel into production because the first movie did so well. There was a gap of 4 years between the release of the first movie to the release of the 2nd movie, allowing enough time for actual writing to get done.

This is the first movie that I actually regretted not seeing in 3D, I didn't see the original in 3D either, but I feel like the movie would have looked great in 3D, I will have to see if any of my friends see it in 3D and how they felt. In general I find it a waste of money, but once in a while something could be good in 3D.

So the entire cast returned from the original movie as well as some new additions including Cate Blanchett and Djimon Hounsou not like they are famous actors or anything. Also joining the cast was Kit Harrington who is also known as Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, who I thought did an amazing job with his character.

Because I am writing this so close to the release of the movie I really don't want to give away any of the details of it. There are lots of great twists and turns that were quite enjoyable, as well as emotional. Holy cow did I get choked up during this movie, and not just once, but several times. I am not one to get choked up or tear up during a movie, but damn this movie got to me. I may have teared up more during this movie than during any other movie I can remember, just go into it knowing that.

With all of that said, this movie was awesome, the action is beautiful, there are sufficient laughs, the characters definitely grow, and it might even rival the first movie in quality. I don't know if I could recommend this movie highly enough, if you have kids, take them to this movie, enjoy it with them, just make sure you are there for them during the emotional parts.

Unrelated to the movie itself, but related to movies in general, I was not thinking this year would be all that exciting when it comes to movies, but I have seen 4 very good movies already this year, with a few more that are in theaters now, I have been quite impressed with all of those that I have seen, hopefully that trend continues.

I put this movie in 2nd place for this year, I really could not think of anything I would change about it, it might not quite have reached the intensity of Captain America 2, this movie is a very good all around movie, and I would guess it is the front runner for the animated film Oscar as of this time.

2014 Movie Rankings:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2. How To Train Your Dragon 2
3. X-Men: Days of Future Past
4. The Lego Movie

Garfunkel and Oates

Garfunkel and Oates are a comedy music duo that I have liked for quite a long time. They have had so many wonderful songs that I listen to quite regularly. The duo is made up of Riki Lindhome and Kate Miccuci both of whom are actresses that have been in many random shows and movies. I first heard of them on various comedy podcasts both playing songs as well as just comedy guests.

I wanted to write about them because they have a show coming out on IFC later this summer. I have been searching, but there is not a specific start date from what I can find. They are doing 10 episodes, and I trust in the creativity and humor that they will no doubt have in there show. Ben Savage is actually producing and directing the show, yes that same Ben Savage, he has become quite the comedy producer and director over the years including but not limited to episodes of Party Down, 2 Broke Girls, and Its Always Sunny to name a few. The limited series will allow Riki and Kate to write more of the stuff themselves while not changing the voice of the show.

I thought I would include a few of their songs in this post for people to enjoy for those interested they are NSFW and mom you probably wouldn't enjoy them so much:

I will stop at 4 videos, but feel free to search on YouTube for them, they have probably about a couple dozen videos out there, and I think the are hilarious as well as great at writing dirty rhymes.

Marvel Movies

I was originally going to make this as a post to try to rank the non-Avengers Marvel movies, but there is so much more to talk about than that. So first to start things out, this post is about all of the different Marvel segments, Marvel Studios owns the rights to all of the movies that have gone into the Avengers as well as many other peripheral and smaller characters, 20th Century Fox owns the rights to X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Columbia Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man.

So as it is my understanding, deals were signed with these other production companies before Marvel started producing its own movies, and the terms of the agreement allowed these companies the right to the characters as long as they kept using those rights. Imagine what could happen if Marvel owned the rights to all of these characters. Imagine who could pop up in what movie? There are so many possibilities that are currently unable to happen.

Now I would assume that these agreements were made well before Marvel started producing its own movies, but even if there was an inkling that they might one day produce their own movies, why would you sign an indefinite contract giving up the movie rights for some of the biggest characters?

Now I can't really complain with what has been done with the X-Men movies, I have enjoyed them all so far. The Spider-Man movies are another story, the first 2 made this whole superhero boom possible, without them we would not have had a chance for The Avengers or all of the movies leading up to it. The issue is the 3rd movie along with The Amazing Spider-Man series. The 3rd movie just had way too much going on, now the stories I have read involve it being the work of too many re-writes and a director who had already done what he had wanted to do in the first 2 films, but was obligated to make the 3rd, also possibly he might have not been in charge of the editing as well. But the new series, I could not have cared less about the first movie, and doubt I will waste time seeing the 2nd movie even on HBO, it just doesn't seem interesting. For the record, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 got 10% less on Rotten Tomatoes than Spider-Man 3.

Now the issue isn't that they are making bad Spider-Man movies, but the fact that they are going to run the character into the ground. They have 3rd and 4th movies scheduled from 2016 and 2018 already, even though this movie was so poorly rated. Give Spidey a break!

Why don't they just sell it back to Marvel for a percent of the proceeds of all future movies made with Spider-Man in them, it just pains me to see this character being ruined for future movies. As long as these movies make money, the studios will keep making them, and my dream of Spider-Man being in the Avengers can no come to fruition. I would also lots to see a Spider-Man and Deadpool movie, also just a Deadpool movie, and so many combinations of these characters teaming up, and even possible secretly popping up in other movies.

On top of the Avengers movies Marvel has been producing TV series, the animated shows actually have the characters teaming up and popping up outside of their normal domain, because Marvel has the right to all of the characters in animated form. I would also love to see an X-Men show like one of the shows being produced for Netflix, take a few of the lesser known X-Men and make a show out of their activities, something online those lines.

This doesn't really need to be mentioned, but The Fantastic Four was just brutal, and it might get messed up once again when they reboot starts up soon. I just think that Marvel could do a much better job than Fox has with it.

The reason that I like Marvel Studios rather than these other Studios is that they have been very methodical about what they have been doing. They choose good writers, as well as good actors to fill the roles, which is also what was so successful about the first 2 Spider-Man movies. The actors don't just have to be good at acting, but a fit for the role.

I guess the real takeaway from all of this ranting is that I wish this was a perfect world, and I wish it wasn't driven by money! I wish we could have some crazy crossovers or even like a Marvel vs DC style movie, but that will, in all likelihood, never happen. I wish this was a world that was ruled by what would make the best and most interesting movies, but what rules the movie industry is only money.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

I must say that I didn't know what to expect from this movie going in. I really enjoyed all of the X-Men movies that have come out, even the much maligned X-Men: The Last Stand. I think X-Men was my favorite cartoon growing up, so there have always been some expectations for the movies, more so than for other comic book movies.

Not to belittle the movie itself, but the most amazing feat in the movie is to get this amazing cast together, now there are a few different groups of characters, but there are so many awesome actors in this movie, and it was nice that they stuck with actors from the original series, and also have brought in some new ones as well.

This is not my favorite X-Men movie, in fact it might be 4th out of the 5 that have been made, but it was still a fun and enjoyable movie. There was not as much action as I would have liked in this movie, but I was still quite interested. I think they tried for a little bit of a different feel than other X-Men movies, and if that was the intent then it worked. They don't introduce that many new characters, but there are a few of them. I honestly would have liked to see Quicksilver a little more, he was the comic relief early in the film. I guess I had missed that Quicksilver had been in the credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier? He was portrayed by a different actor, but that is something I would like to look at again, he will be portrayed by the same guy who played Kick-Ass in the Kick-Ass movies, so that should be interesting.

It really seems like they tried hard to show Mystique as Jennifer Lawrence a lot, when the character would have likely been in normal blue state, but I guess if you have Jennifer Lawrence in a movie you are going to show her being Jennifer Lawrence. I could really mention all of the different cast members and say that they all did a good job, which they did, but come on is there more perfect casting than Hugh Jackman as Wolverine? Even in the terribly written Origins movie he still was great as Wolverine. I am glad that they were able to work in more Beast action, in the other movies the character has been in, he hasn't been all that involved. In this movie he is part of the movie for the majority of it, he was my favorite character growing up.

I do feel like a little something was missing from this, maybe it was just some extra fighting, but when the mutants are all on the same side, for the most part, the fighting is kept to a minimum. If they mutants were to fight the humans too much it would just lead to dead humans in all likelihood. I also was happy that they actually had sentinels in this movie, I remember sentinels as much as any other things from the cartoon growing up, and the way this movie ended they could easily pop up in the future in similar ways to that of the cartoon as well.

It is really hard to try to describe this movie, and try to relate it to other things. This is a bit of a spoiler, but what this movie did is that it can actually be watched in the same cycle as the first set of X-men movies, but then its also possible that this series can get back into the events as the first series, yet both happened? It rebooted the whole thing, while also validating what had already happened in the other movies. So they could actually make X-Men movies in the past which would be following up this story line, while also making X-Men movies in today's present times, and they could all be in the same time stream. I know I am making this more complicated than it needs to be.

I have a bit of a rant to on for Marvel movies in general. I am going to create that as its own post in the next few days.

I think all of the movies that I have seen this year have been good, and borderline ownable. Its really hard to rank this, I have to put it just ever so slightly ahead of the Lego Movie this year, but that is really a toss up for me.

2014 movie rankings:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2. X-Men: Days of Future Past

3. The Lego Movie

Peter's Cooking Diary #25

I have to admit I have been a bit uninspired with my cooking lately, I need to start making some new recipes or something, because it seems like I have made a lot of these recipes before, and I want to keep making some new things. I will have to start brainstorming new ideas for that, I kind only have a set of a few low carb dishes that I like to make.

The first dish I wanted to make this week was a semi homemade type of thing that I did with things that I made with things that I already had on hand. A friend had left some Ninja Turtles Mac and Cheese which was the start of the dish.

I started off by mincing some garlic and some onion, to add more of a depth of flavor to the dish. I enjoy Kraft mac and cheese, but adding more flavor definitely helped.

I took the butter that would be mixed in with the sauce, and I cooked the onion and garlic down in it until they were softened.

I added a can of tuna to the pan and let it incorporate with all sorts of flavors as well as some oregano and some red pepper flake.

I melted some more butter and tossed some panko bread crumbs in them and just tossed them until lightly toasted and the butter was absorbed.

The last thing I did was chop up some string cheese which I had on hand.

The cooked noodles, some of the pasta water, and the cheese sauce in an oven safe dish.

I stirred in the onion, garlic, tuna, butter, spice mixture and stirred everything together well.

I mixed in the chopped up cheese bits, and then topped the dish with the panko bread crumbs and baked the dish in the oven at 425 for 7 minutes. I went until the bread crumbs were toasted on top. One thing to mention is that I intentionally undercooked the pasta as I knew it would cook more in the oven.

This was the finished dish, my semi-homemade baked tuna mac. It was amazingly delicious and quite possibly the best mac and cheese I have ever made. You could add just about anything you want to the mac and cheese. I really did have all of the things sitting around and threw them in, you could add bacon, you could add any meat you wanted. You could add corn, or peas or any vegetable you wanted to this as well. You can also add whatever spices you want to try in this dish, I just don't like to make things exactly as stated on the box.

Something I never really discussed previously how I use bacon in my dishes. I always keep the bacon in the fridge until I am able to use it. If you are slicing the bacon, it cuts much more easily when it is cold or even frozen than when it is allowed to reach room temperature.

 I slide the bacon because it cooks much faster than cooking it in strips, and I also can get the whole package in the pan rather than doing a few strips at a time.

This is just the normal bacon cooking shot that I have in here quite regularly, I love the smell of bacon, and I love draining it as it cooks. I feel like I can get more grease out of the bacon this way rather than through strips.

The bacon is getting used in this dish, well a portion of it is anyway. I removed it from the pan and drained off all but a few tablespoons of the grease.

I added the onions and garlic to the pan and let them sizzle for a little while, the liquid released from the onions is great at loosening up. The little bits of bacon are definitely good for the flavor of the dish.

You can tell the onions and garlic have picked up some stuff from the bottom of the pan. This is about half way through the cooking.

This is when the onions were about done, I added some thyme, red pepper flake, and some flour and stirred it all together, then I added some chicken stock to get up any last bits from the pan before transferring to the crock pot.

This is everything from the pan plus about half of the cooked bacon, some soy sauce, the rest of the chicken stock, and some bay leaves.

I seasoned the pork chops with salt and pepper and then pushed them into the other ingredients, from there I covered and cooked on high for 5 hours.

This is the finished dish, I removed the pork chops and let them cool, and then allowed the sauce to cool as well, removed some of the fat from the surface of the pan, and then stirred in some apple cider vinegar to balance out the sauce.

Since I have covered oven roasted broccoli previously I won't worry about that too much in this edition. I did get a small food processor, and I used it to make some smashed cauliflower, which is much lighter and fluffier when run through the food processor. I look forward to try to do all sorts of different things with it in the future.

Peter's Cooking Diary #24

Well I took a week off from writing on here because I made stuff that wasn't really anything new for me. This week I was feeling a bit more adventurous, I made something that I have never made before, and I actually didn't have a recipe, I just tried something out from my own brain and it really worked. My inspiration this week was Chipotle, I wanted to try to make the ingredients that I get in a burrito bowl. We will start from the bottom up.

This was the first thing that I made, 1 lb of pinto beans, 2 cups of chicken stock for flavor, and 3 cups of water. I added some bay leaves, oregano, cumin, coriander, and some mexican chili powder. The beans  cooked for 5 hours in the crock pot.

This was the finished pot of beans, I drained most of the liquid from them and put them in my container and placed them in the fridge.

The next item I was making was some slow cooked carnitas using this smallish pork roast.

I pretty much used the same spices for the pork as I did for the beans, plus I added some salt to this spice mix as well. I stirred everything to combine in the bowl.

I coated all of the sides of the roast liberally with the spice mixture.

I added the roast to the crock pot dry, to keep the spices from all getting washed off right away.

I poured about 2 cups of chicken stock to the side of the roast as a cooking liquid and also added a few more bay leaves to the pot for more seasoning. The roast cooked for 10 hours on low, or just overnight while I slept.

This is what the roast looked like when it was done cooking. I removed it from the pot and let if cook for about an hour. I let the juices stay in the pan and cool off as well. I removed any chunks of fat that were floating in the juices.

I hand pulled the pork into bite size pieces, and removed any pieces of fat that I found. I also poured the remaining juices over the pork to keep it nice and juicy.

So the final thing I made was some corn salsa, I have always wanted to make some corn salsa, and figured it would go well with the things I was making. So this is 5 ears of corn with husks and silk removed, on a foil lined baking sheet that is coated in cooking spray. I placed them under the broiler for about 10 minutes and rotated them and put them back in for another 10.

This is the final roasted corn, I guess my oven is a little bit uneven as some of the corn got way more roasted than the other ears.

I took a knife and removed all of the kernels from the cob, I also ran the back of the knife down the cob to get as much of the corn out cob as I could.

The next step was to roast the pepper that I was cooking with, I used the broiler to roast the peppers using a method I saw online, removing the stems and seeds from the peppers and flattening them out. If I had gas burners I would have used them to roast the peppers, but I had to use what I have.

I roasted the peppers for about 10 minutes, in retrospect I would have probably cooked them for a few more minutes and gotten them really charred.

While the peppers were still hot, I tossed them in a bowl and popped the lid on to steam from their own heat, this would help to loosen the charred skin from the peppers.

I let the peppers steam for a while in the bowl before removing the skins from all of them. When I said I would have cooked them a bit longer, it was because some of the skins were really hard to get off, a little more cooking would have made that a lot easier.

This is the pile of roasted peppers.

I took them one by one and chopped them very finely, cutting them in strips vertically and then chopping finely across. This might have actually been some of my best knife work and it was at like 11pm at night as well. I wish I would have taken better pictures to illustrate what I did.

This is the corn along with all of the chopped peppers. I also forgot to mention, I used 2 red bell peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers and 2 anaheim peppers. I really wanted to get some poblanos, but the only poblanos that were left on the shelf were super wrinkly and did not feel or look fresh at all.

To finish the salsa, I added some cilantro and some minced red onion, as well as the juice of one line and a little bit of salt for seasoning. This salsa could not have turned out better. I really like it and will definitely be trying to do things similar to this in the future, especially when local sweet corn is available.

I eat the bowls with beans, pork, and the corn salsa, as well as some guacamole and the bowls I have made have been very delicious.