Rocky Mountain Randoms: The Mamma Mia! Edition

I'll get to why I need therapy in a minute, but first:

- I wasn't able to get a good picture of Elk Mountain from a distance when Wiley and I hiked it last week because I approached it from the northeast. Today I happened to be driving toward it from the south and was able to snap the photo below, which gives you a better idea of its size and shape... it's the big lump in the middle of the background:

- As many of you know, not only am I not a fan of eating chocolate, but it's also not my favorite thing to work with. While I eventually got confident about tempering it in Vegas and at school, my tempering tries here have been hit-or-miss, largely because the kitchen is comparatively small and gets so hot that to get it tempered I have to go in and out of the walk-in.

That said, on Friday I got out my chocolate mold and tried tempering in the morning, when only one oven is on and the line cooks aren't around yet. I also tried putting the bowl on top of ice for a few seconds at a time to get it cool enough. And behold!! While the strawberries I dipped in the same exact chocolate at the right temp bloomed within minutes (dang it!) the dark chocolate caramels I made with the mold came out beautifully and didn't bloom or lose their sexy sheen or leak or anything:

(Tempering chocolate, for those of you who complain I use too many fancy-pants pastry terms without defining them, is simply the process of controlling the size and shape of the fat crystals in the chocolate so that it has a lush sheen, sets quickly and can set thinly and then break with a clean snap. Chocolate that doesn't set, gets dull and/or looks moldy isn't tempered... the mold is just "bloom," when the fat separates from the rest of the matter. It's fine to eat.)

I'm most proud of getting a good temper because none of the chocolate we have in the restaurant is good for seeding... due to the heat of the kitchen, it's all bloomed.

- Here's another dessert I'm working on to add to the menu instead of my strawberry-basil creation (the season is really over for strawberries). It's Grand Marnier frozen souffle with local raspberries, chocolate tuile and hot fudge sauce that the customer can pour on top of the souffle.

While I like the plating, I recognize that the tuile is too fragile and cumbersome for the pantry cook to deal with in the middle of service, and two of the line cooks who saw me tinkering with it said they thought the plate was too white (empty). So I'm thinking of changing the tuile shape and adding a sauce to the plate, though I still like the idea of the hot fudge in a cruet (as long as I don't have to eat it!)

- Now, to the meat of the matter... I drove an hour and a half to go to the movies today, because I've been really wanting to see, yes, Mamma Mia! for the sole reason that it stars both Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard.

Well, uhm...

I should have known it was not the movie for me when I arrived in the theater and sat down in the first row of stadium seating and the chubby middle-aged woman with hair down to her butt, sitting at the opposite end of the row, shrieked "I'm saving this row! Those seats are saved!"

Nevermind that she and I were two of about a dozen people in the entire theater. I sat down on the end and told her my legs are too long to be comfortable elsewhere (which is actually true). She gave me the lazer stare of death. Whatev, sistah.

She was joined by several other chubby, long-haired, rather intense women (who, by the way, didn't fill up the row. So there.), all of whom had clearly seen the movie many, many times.

I got a little anxious because hey, I'm chubby and long-haired (tho' not that long-haired) and I really hope I don't look like that much of a stereotypical spinster. But these women, well, they reminded me of the rabid Barry Manilow and Josh Groban fans I used to have to deal with when I was a music journalist. Scary.

The string of trailers deepened my unease. They were all for movies I had no intention of ever seeing, even if trapped on a plane with a chatty seatmate.

The movie starts. Yes, I knew there'd be singing. I mean, it is a musical. But it soon became apparent: I was watching a foreign film. You know how sometimes you watch a foreign film that's been dubbed, so it's in English but you don't understand the culture the produced it, the pace is different than you're used to in American movies and you start to feel dumb for not "getting it"? Yeah, well, that's what I mean.

Don't get me wrong... Colin Firth did his usual charmingly uptight Englishman thing, and the scene where he plays guitar was the sweetest bit of puppy-dog-eyed-hottie-strumming since I saw Mike Huckabee rocking out on bass during the primaries.

And Stellan was of course great, and seemed wildly amused to be singing and dancing, as if he was just tickled silly to have hoodwinked fans of his Serious Work in to see a movie based on Sweden's other great export.

Don't get me wrong on that, either... I like ABBA's dancy songs (not the ballads), and rank them up near Stellan, IKEA and Prinsesstarta in the reasons to be glad Sweden so thoroughly resisted falling under Nazi occupation*.

(*Sorry, kind of an in-joke with myself... when I went to the Norwegian Nazi Resistance Museum in Oslo, the guy staffing the desk joked that next time I was in Stockholm I should check out the Swedish Nazi Resistance Museum... there isn't one. The Norwegians are pretty proud of their anti-Nazi efforts, and rightly so... if you're ever in Oslo, you have to visit the museum. It's one of the best-designed and most intelligent I've ever been to. Stockholm, to its credit, does have an awesome sewer exhibit in one of its natural history museums, or at least it did when I was there a few times in the mid-90s.)

Anyway... despite the calming, charming and reassuring presence of Firth and Skarsgard, the rest of the movie frightened me. Way too much perkiness, and vamping, and kissing, and improbably good-looking pan-ethnic people on a remote Greek island despite clearly not being Greek. Why was the mom on that island 20 years ago to begin with? Why was the mom in her 60s and the kid just 20? If she had sex with three men over a month-span, surely she could have figured out which one was the father, no? I mean, was she that stupid? If it was set in present-day, why were all the flashbacks of 20 years ago to the mid-70s?

Aside from being confused by the plot, scared of the manaically aggressive cheeriness of the film (do we really need to see Meryl Streep, or anyone, for that matter, jumping up and down on her bed in soft-focus, slow motion? Why? Why??) and disconcerted by the Spinster Brigade beside me singing along and laughing way, way too loud over the lame slapstick humor, I just really felt out of place.

I desperately wanted someone to get beheaded (onscreen or in the row beside me would be fine), or to be sent off on a doomed mission, preferably on horseback, or for something, anything to explode in a massive fireball. That would have put me at ease.

Instead it was two hours of candy-colored fluff and farce (the brainless kind) that I just didn't connect with. Apparently I was the only one in the theater who felt that way, as much merriment was had by all the rest. Part of me wanted to stand up and shout "hey! I like romantic stuff! The Princess Bride is my all-time favorite movie! I love Pride and Prejudice! The book and all the screen adaptations, dammit!" But the rest of me just slid lower in my stadium seating chair.

If you do go to see Mamma Mia! (the movie) and find yourself having the same reaction, please take my advice and leave before the end credits. Because at the end, (spoiler) all the leads come out in full spandex, spangles and platform boots that Liberace would have found vulgar to dance and sing one more time.

I could have gone to my grave remembering Colin Firth as the utterly perfect Mr. Darcy and Stellan Skarsgard as the deliciously low-key bad guy Cerdic or somberly sexy Father Merrin or even the doomed sub captain Tupolev... instead the image of them cavorting clumsily in red sequins and spandex is burned indelibly into my mind.

Shudder.

On the drive home I listened to Alice in Chains. I felt a little better.