Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I had put off seeing this movie for a bit too long, it wasn't that I hadn't wanted to see it, it was that I just didn't have the want to go see a movie in the theater. I had been looking forward to this movie for quite a while, I like the first Captain America a bit more than most. I did have it as my 3rd favorite movie in the Avengers cycle.

I really like the different things that Marvel Studios has done with the different movies. The first Captain America was a war movie, and each of the movies that they have put out have had their own feeling to them. The feel of this movie was a bit difficult to explain, it is a bit of an espionage/spy movie, but also makes me think of movies like the Mission Impossible series. It was definitely a lot different of a feel than the first.

While it may have been different from the first movie, I actually think that it was even better than the first as well. Similar to Iron Man 3, this movie deals with what the characters do after The Avengers, with the added bonus of Captain America trying to adapt to the modern world after being frozen for so long in the Arctic.

This movie does pretty much everything right. The mystery and intrigue is very engaging. I really liked the performances in the movie, Chris Evans does a good job, and Scarlett Johansson does a great job in her role as The Black Widow, and actually the movie brings out a little bit of the character's back story. Robert Redford does an awesome job in the movie, and looks surprisingly spry for his age as well. I really enjoyed newcomer Anthony Mackie in his role as Sam Wilson/The Falcon, a character I knew of but didn't really know much about. I look forward to seeing him more in other Captain America movies, and possibly the Avengers. He is definitely a character that could have a peripheral role in future Avengers movies.

I don't really want to give away all of the details of the movie, but there are several twists and turns that occur, and some were more surprising than others, but they all worked well within the story. I really liked the story between Cap and Black Widow, I thought they really worked well together in the movie and their teamwork really worked.

The movie has some humor, not too much, not too little, but just right. There are a few different visual gags in the movie, the first one to look for is to read the things on Captain America's list of things he has missed, and the second is the quote on a grave. I wish I could say more about the 2nd one, but I really don't feel like spoiling any parts of the story.

I have placed below the rankings of all of the movies made by Marvel Studios, and this one is quite highly rated as you will see. I think what sets Iron Man above this movie is that Iron Man has Robert Downey Jr. in it. I like Chris Evans, I think he is great for the role of Captain America, but he just does not bring the same pizzazz that RDJ has.

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

2014 movie rankings:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2. The Lego Movie

Peter's Cooking Diary #23

So I want to start off this weeks blog by mentioning how much awesome produce I have received from the mom. I get a wide variety of things from her during the growing months, and also something things during the long winter as well. She has provided me with a lot of home grown and home made tomato sauce, with all sorts of different greens from  mixed salad greens to dried greens like the bok choy I used in this week's cooking. She uses her food dehydrator to make dried apples, banana chips, and even fruit leather. There are numerous of things like garlic that I have used in many different dishes in my cooking. This blog is a tribute to the things my mom gives me that contribute to my cooking.

We are starting off with most of the ingredients being put into my sausage and bean stew. The bags of dried greens that I received from my mom, I had 3 different types of beans in my cabinet that I wanted to use up, some chicken stock, an onion and some garlic. I was going to put celery in the dish, but I just left it in the fridge when I was preparing everything. I also get my absent mindedness from my mom. There was also a yogurt container filled with my mom's tomato sauce going into this.

I am a bit of a bargain hunter at the grocery store, I love the extra discounted meats at Festival foods. Its the meats that are approaching the date they can no longer be sold, and they sell them at a great discount. I do make sure to use it within a day of buying it, or I will stick it right into the freezer. I came across these mild sausages in the that section and though they could be fun to cook with.

The issue with them being in casings and going into the soup is that its just much easier to brown them off without the casings on so I just sliced the casing and pretty easily removed the vast majority of the meat from the casing.

I started the tomatoes in the crock pot, putting it on low, letting it come up to temperature, before adding more.

I added the dried bok choy to the pot with the tomatoes, and some chicken stock letting them start to reconstitute in the pot. I also added a little salt for the tomatoes.

I put the sausages in the pan with a little bit of vegetable oil over medium high heat. I used a spatula to chop the sausage up into smaller bit to cook faster, and also I would want them in smaller bits in the stew.

This was when the sausage had finished cooking, I used a slotted spoon to get the sausage out of the pan and into the crock put, I didn't dump all of the grease out so I could use it.

Wish the sausage grease left in the pan I added the onion and garlic to the pan and spent a lot of time scraping up and of the sausage bits left in the pant.

I added some thyme, oregano, and red pepper flake to the pan as well as some flour to help thicken the soup.

After the flour had been cooked into the onion, garlic, and spice mixture, I then added the remaining chicken stock to the pan, and stirred it all together, once again making sure I got everything off the bottom of the pan.

This is the soup as I was about to put the lid on, and let it simmer for about 4 hours.

After the soup had been cooking for about 4 hours, I shut the heat off and let it cool down. I then removed some of the fat that settled towards the top as well as the bay leaves. I then added the 3 kinds of beans to the pot. I didn't cook the beans with everything else  I just stirred them in and let it all sit overnight before having some for lunch today.

This is the finished dish. I really like the different colors of beans in the dish, it really looks cool to me like this. This same dish could easily be made with ground pork, ground turkey, ground chicken, or many other things. It was quite good for lunch, and quite filling.

This is the start for my version of puttanesca sauce that I first saw made by Rachel Ray, but of course I had to do my own take on it. Starts with some olive oil, and some onion and garlic as well as a little salt to help them sweat.

I added some tomato paste to the pan and stirred it in. I would have also added some anchovy paste to the pan, but for whatever reason I just forgot that in the cabinet, it is actually one of the traditional ingredients in this sauce.

I added another container of my mom's tomato sauce, and stirred it all together and let it cook for just a few minutes.

I added a few handfuls of kalamata olives as well as the red wine vinegar that they are sitting in. I gently squeezed the olives when adding them to the sauce pan to get a little bit more of the liquid out. It will provide some nice acidity to the dish.

I chopped up some fresh basil and added it along with some dried oregano, and some red pepper flake. I stilled all of the ingredients together again, and gave it a few more minutes to cook together.

I flaked out a few cans of white tuna to make sure it was broken up into small pieces.

I added the tuna and stirred it all together. I brought the sauce to a simmer, and let it simmer on low heat with the lid on for about 30 minutes.

This is the finished sauce. I like it over some kind of curly noodle, or a tube, it is ok with any kind of strand, but the chunks work better for me with something else.

Peter's Cooking Diary #22

So this was was a great week of cooking, I actually made 3 different things, A pizza, some mexican style brown rice, and some pinto beans. I think that these dished could easily be made vegetarian and are also great for someone on a budget. Beans and rice are both extremely cheap, and some of the things can be easily substituted to make the recipes even cheaper.

The cooking started with 2 onions and 2 heads of garlic. I decided it would be easier to just chop up the onions and mince the garlic all at once to save myself some prep time.

Chopped onion and garlic one I had finished with them.

This recipe called for coating the interior of the crock pot with cooking spray, which is easier said than done. I actually found it easier to do by lifting the insert out and holding it on its side and spraying the can inside.

After I was satisfied with the spraying, this is what it looked like.

On top of the spraying, this recipe called for adding some butter in to the crock pot to add some flavor and a little bit more fat.

Into the pot with the butter I added, 2 cups of brown rice, some Mexican style chile powder, and some salt to the pot.

The recipe called for bringing 3 cups of water to a boil, then whisking in 3 cloves of garlic and 3 tablespoons of tomato paste. Once the tomato paste was distributed in the water, I added the mixture to the crock pot and stirred to combine everything.

After cooking for 2 hours on high, the rice was perfectly cooked. I stirred in some lime juice and some cilantro. This was a great recipe and I plan to make it more in the future.

After cleaning out the crock pot it was time to start the second recipe and the food that would go along with the finished rice. To start I added one pound of pinto beans, a few bay leaves, and some ham hocks to the cooker. I actually added no salt to the beans, the hocks on their own will add plenty of salt to the dish on their own.

Once the beans are cooked through I turned the cooker off, and removed the ham hocks from the crock pot to cool. Once they were cooked I removed the meat from them.

I chopped the meat up into small pieces and set it aside.

I sauteed some onions and garlic in bacon grease, because why not add a little more pork fat to this dish right?

After the onions and garlic had some time to cook I added a large can of fire roasted mild green chiles, I love using these whenever I can because they add great flavor to anything. The recipe actually called for a bell pepper but I decided to use the canned peppers instead.

I added some oregano and cumin to the pan and let the veggies cook together a bit to kind of marry the flavors.

This is the onion, pepper, and garlic as well as a few scoops of the beans from the crock pot.

The combination was then mashed together to help the flavors all meld together.

Combined the rest of the beans, the meat, and the previous mixture together along with some cilantro and lime juice and stirred them together. By mashing the stuff up in the previous picture the final combination has a consistency of refried beans which kind of holds is all together instead of it being loose beans.

The final thing I made was a tuna pizza, but it start with more onion and garlic betting cooked down on bacon grease.

I cooked the onion and garlic down until they were soft and translucent.

I drained and flaked out a large can of tuna, once the onion and garlic was done cooking I added that combination to the tuna and mixed it all together.

I stretched out some store bought whole wheat crust on a pan that I had sprayed with some cooking spray. I then topped with with plain tomato sauce.

On top of the sauce I added some dried oregano and some fresh basil I really love the flavor of fresh basil in pizza, I think it is one of my favorite flavors in the world.

I topped the pizza with the tuna onion and garlic mixture, and added some parmesan cheese, and some shredded cheese to the top.

The finished cooked pizza, it was amazing! There was probably a little bit too much  onion on the pizza, but its hard to complain, I really liked it.

Food Adventures: Salt #3

Well my friend Shealaina and I made another trip back to SALT which has to be my favorite restaurant by now, everything I have eaten there has been amazing. This time around we went for the weeknight tasting menu, which was a limited selection of a small plate, salad, and a large plate, and all of it was for a very decent price.

I have shown a picture of this on here from the first time we went, but this was my first course, shrimp and grits with a rich spicy tomato sauce. I liked it so much that I had to just get it again. There was some deep fried noodles and parsley on top. It was great once again, I would eat anything they put with the grits, just so amazing.

This was Shealaina's first dish, it was General Tso's pork belly, and it was amazingly good. It was chunks of pork belly with the flavor of General Tso's, also there were some fried rice balls, some roasted broccolini, and a sriracha aioli. The pork belly was amazing along with everything else in the dish. I would also order that again, such a great combination of flavors.

I was feeling a bit daring, so I thought I would try the roasted beet salad, I have honestly not ever really eaten beets, but I thought I would give it a try. It was large pieces of roasted beets under baby arugula that was lightly dressed with vinaigrette topped with some goat cheese. Honestly I liked every part of the salad but the beets, in the future I will just get a normal side salad, but I liked that I got out of my comfort zone and tried something new. I think if the beets were broken down a bit more they would have been easier to eat with the other ingredients, but it was super hard to cut them in the dish they were served in.

  This was my large plate that I chose, it was call steak kim-chimichurri, and it really did combine the flavors of both kim chi and chimichurri. It was sliced seasoned flank steak, with a papaya slaw(which took the place of kim chi), they were on top of some chorizo croquets, with chimichurri sauce and some guacamole. That is a lot of different elements that really worked well together. I tried to get bites with everything in them and they were all delicious alone and when combined together. I would absolutely order this again. My mouth is watering while writing this.

I have to say it was another awesome trip to SALT, and I know that we will be going back again some time.