Week 2: Grosse Pointe Blank and "School" Pizza

Our next back-to-school themed movie is Grosse Pointe Blank.  Neither of us had ever seen this movie before, and I can't even say I've seen it now since I fell asleep halfway through....oops.  This is a common theme with me.  I've fallen asleep in movie theaters multiple times.  I guess a Friday night movie after a long work-week is not a good idea.

Anyway, the movie stars John Cusack as a hit-man who goes back to his hometown to complete a job and ends up attending his 10-year high school reunion.  Weird premise that made for a weird movie.  I have to say, not my favorite John Cusack movie - and I usually really like him.  Anyway, we'll get to the movie review later.  First, the food.

We decided to go with a "school lunch" theme.  Neither of us wanted sloppy joes, so pizza was the next iconic school lunch to cross our minds.  Rosemary chicken pizza to be exact.  This was not a pizza you'd normally find in a school cafeteria, but it tasted much better!  We also had parmesan kale chips and oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies.  I made the dessert, Matt made everything else.  He's the blogging rockstar this week.  I'll let him start with his recipes.

Matt: Some blogging rockstar...sorry this is a little late, everyone :)

Rosemary Chicken Pizza

Total Prep Time: Varies (Depends on your Bread Machine.  Prep after dough is made is about 20 minutes)

Ingredients:

(Pizza Dough)

2 1/4 Cups Bread Flour

3/4 Cup Water

1 Tablespoon Sugar

1 Tablespoon Oil

1 Teaspoon Salt

1 Teaspoon Yeast

(Toppings)

2 Cups Chopped Cooked Chicken

1 Medium Red Onion, chopped

2 Garlic Cloves

1 tsp dry rosemary leaves

2 Cups Shredded Mozzarella Cheese

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

1. In your bread machine, mix the bread ingredients, and select the "Pizza Dough" setting. When done, take out and let rise an extra ten minutes on the counter while covered.

2. In the meantime, grill two chicken breasts until cooked.  Remove and chop into small pieces. Cover.

3. Work the pizza dough into a circle, and spread 2 tablespoons of olive oil on top.  Add toppings evenly, top with mozzarella cheese.

4. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-22 minutes, or until cheese is golden brown.  Cut into wedges and eat!

This pizza turned out amazing, and it smelled so good!  The only suggestion that I would make is to make up a quick sauce for the pizza; it is a little heavy on the dough.  But otherwise, it was great!

Parmesan Kale Chips

Total Prep Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

1 lb Kale

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

1/2 Cup Parmesan Cheese

Salt and Pepper to taste

1. Chop kale stems off, and cut leaves into smallish "potato chip" size pieces. 

2. Place leaves into bowl with olive oil.  Mix well.

3. Lay leaves in a single layer on a foil covered baking pan.  Salt and pepper to taste. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

4. Remove from oven, top with parmesan cheese, let sit for 2-3 minutes, then move to bowl and serve.

I LOVE KALE CHIPS YUMYUMYUM.  I mean, they turned out okay...and by that, I mean we finished almost all of them before the pizza was done :)

Oatmeal Butterscotch Chip Cookies

from The Pioneer Woman Website

1. Heat the oven to 350 F.
2. In your mixer beat together the butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in vanilla. Add eggs, one at a time, scraping the bowl after each one.
3. Mix together the flour, salt, and baking soda in a medium sized bowl. Add it into the creamed mixture in 2 to 3 batches, mixing it until just combined. Mix in the oats until just combined. Add the butterscotch chips.
4. Using a spoon, drop portions of dough on a greased cookie sheet, spacing them a couple inches apart. Bake for 12-13 minutes or until they get dark.
5. Let them cool on the pan, then transfer the cookies onto a plate for serving. Enjoy!

And now, Our Feature Presentation...

Matt: If you've met my wife, chances are you know that she's a huge John Cusack fan. I don't particularly care one way or another, but after watching Grosse Pointe Blank, I think I'm staying away from him for a while.

This movie's biggest crime is that its amazingly forgettable.  The next morning after watching this, I couldn't remember any one line that stayed in my head, and I felt absolutely zero emotional attachment to any of the characters.  

And its not like the movie develops any role besides Cusack's character. For example, Alan Arkin (the old man in Little Miss Sunshine) plays Cusack's psychiatrist Dr. Oatman...sort of.  Mostly, Cusack just calls Oatman's voicemail, and we see brief reaction shots of Oatman going "Oh God!"  The two NSA agents following Cusack suffer a similar fate (and are exterminated in an equally callous manner). 

Bottom line: Grosse Pointe Blank is a cinematic quagmire of emptiness. It doesn't care, and we shouldn't either.  Stay away. Stay far away.

Week One: Back to School! The Breakfast Club, Quiche, and Coffee Cake

Since Matt and I are both teachers, August marks back-to-school month for us.  So we thought it only fitting that our first few movies would fall under the back-to-school theme.  Maybe blogging will help us forget that our summer is over....tear : (

Anyway, when we were first listing "school" movies, I immediately thought of The Breakfast Club.  I also remembered Matt, my favorite movie buff, has never seen that classic John Hughes movie.  Gasp!

Apparently, he's never been a huge fan of John Hughes - come on - Ferris Bueller,  Home Alone, Curly Sue - you can't go wrong!   He also isn't in love with "coming of age" stories, so I wasn't sure if he'd like this one or not.  Even if he didn't, I figured, at least we'd have some good food.

So with a movie with breakfast in the title, what else could we eat but breakfast?  On this week's menu: Honey Walnut Coffee Cake (made by Matt) and Ham and Veggie Quiche Cups (made by Amy).  Too bad Matt's best ideas come a little too late...as soon as both recipes were out of the oven, he said, "Umm  I think we already dropped the ball."  Me: What do you mean?  Matt: Why didn't we make a "Breakfast Club Sandwich"?  Me: Shoot.  Next time I guess.  Good thing the coffee cake and quiche cups were delicious!

I'll start with the recipe for the Quiche Cups.  These are super adaptable (you can throw in whatever omelet-type of veggies or meats that you have).  Plus, they would be a cute appetizer too.  I loosely adapted a recipe from The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook called "Spinach Quiche".  The egg mixture is mostly the same as the one in the recipe, but I made mini-muffin style quiches rather than a full pie.

Ham and Vegetable Quiche Cups

adapted from The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook

Yield: 24 mini-quiches plus 4 muffin-sized quiches

Total Prep and Cook Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

2 prepared pie-crusts

1/2 cup onion - chopped

3 slices deli ham - cut into bite-sized pieces

6 eggs

1/2 cup sour cream

1/2 cup milk

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

1 serrano pepper - diced (seeds and ribs removed)

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 red peppers - diced

1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees fahrenheit.

2. Roll out pie crusts.  Cut rounds using a 2-3 inch biscuit/cookie cutter.  Place pie crust rounds into mini-muffin tins, pressing the sides of the dough up the sides of the tin.  (For the regular-sized muffin tins, I combined two pie crust rounds together).

3. In a skillet over medium-low heat, cook chopped onion and peppers in the olive oil until onions are translucent and peppers are tender.

4. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together eggs, sour cream, milk, salt, and pepper.  Stir in pepper mixture and ham.

5. Spoon egg mixture into prepared muffin tins.  Fill mixture to the top of each muffin cup.

6. Bake at 375 for 12-15 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Optional: You may add a sprinkle of cheese to the top of the muffins about halfway through cooking time.

These mini-quiches were delicious.  Next time, I'd love to add some bacon or sausage, and I think spinach would have been great too.  Hopefully someday I'll get up the courage to make my own pie crust, but store-bought was good for today!

As much as I loved my quiche recipe, Matt's Honey Walnut Coffee Cake was the highlight for me.  Especially warm out of the oven when the honey was more melted and the bread was soft and hot.  So tasty.  I'll let him tell you more about that recipe.

Honey Walnut Coffee Cake

from the Betty Crocker Bread Machine Cookbook

Dough Recipe

1/4 cup water

2/3 cup sour cream

2 tablespoons butter, softened

1 egg

3 cups bread flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons bread machine yeast

1/4 cup butter, melted

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup honey

Honey-Walnut Filling

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup honey

1. Mix the dough ingredients in the bread machine according to your machine's instructions.  Set to Dough Manual (so there are no delay cycles).
2. Mix the Honey Walnut Filling together. Set aside.
3. Mix 1/4 cup butter, brown sugar, and honey on the bottom of a 13 x 9 pan; spread evenly.
4. Roll dough into a 24 x 9 rectangle. Spread the filling crosswise over half the rectangle.  Fold dough crosswise in half over filling, and seal edges. Cut into six two-inch strips, twist each loosely, and place crosswise in pan. Cover and let rise 1 hour.
5. Heat over to 375 degrees. Bake 25 minutes or until golden brown. Immediately turn upside down onto heatproof platter; leave pan on top for 1 minute. Serve warm.


Oh yeah, these were good.

And now, Our Feature Presentation...

Matt: I’m not going to lie; I never really had a desire to watch The Breakfast Club. I’m not sure why.  Perhaps its because…I’m not totally in love with John Hughes…  Go ahead, shoot me, but its true.  I love Planes, Trains, and Automobiles because of the chemistry between John Candy and Steve Martin, and I guilty-pleasure enjoy Home Alone because my grandma had the VHS.  And whenever someone told me I just had to see The Breakfast Club, I would just remind them that John Hughes also wrote Flubber and Home Alone 4…yeah, let that sink in a bit…

For those of you like me (all five of you) who haven’t seen The Breakfast Club, here’s the Cliff Notes version: five different “stereotypical” kids (the athlete, princess, nerd, criminal, and outcast) all get a day-long detention on a Saturday for reasons we come to learn as the movie progresses.  As our understanding of their personal backgrounds progress, we also learn how they transcend the stereotypes that they initially seem to embody.

Unburdened as I am by a lack of nostalgia for this flick, I feel as though I can see this movie in a more critical light.  Overall, I enjoyed The Breakfast Club for what it is, but I was a little troubled by some very large assumptions that this movie makes; chiefly, that these stereotypes embody the five main stereotypes of American high school students.  But that’s not quite true, is it? Despite their diverse backgrounds, they clearly are going to a very large high school with some moolah (seriously, that library is bigger than my high school’s gym).  Oh, and that $31,000 salary the principal makes? That’s $70,000 grand in 2013 money; not too shabby (although as Amy points out, not nearly as much as some of the principals in the Chicago-suburb area are making today).  And despite being set in a large city, there are no minority characters in this movie, and the stereotypes depicted are clearly slanted towards white middle/upper-middle class ideas of students.

Finally, I also feel like the movie’s ending is a little unearned.  Oh look, in just eight hours, we all love each other (and in the case of four of the five, end up in relationships).  Perhaps I could buy the ending a bit more if it ended a bit more ambiguously, when the five students are debating if they will still be friends come Monday; this is clearly the “love conquers all” version.

If it feels like I’m harping on this movie too much, again, I’m not sure what else to think.  The movie is essentially a character study on the typical American student, in which we know some or all of the characters will change from the normal, but we want to see how. Its just that this isn’t 1985 anymore, and the larger cultural understanding of the prototypical American has changed. 

Oh well, at least it wasn’t Flubber.  And the mini-quiches were yummy.

Amy:  I still enjoy this movie, and it probably has something to do with nostalgia.  There are a few things I don't like about it.  Namely that 20+ year-olds play the part of high school students, but that's pretty normal with movies about teens.  I also agree with Matt about some of it being unbelievable and unrealistic, but that doesn't bother me too much.  Mostly I like that the movie is a character study of the five kids.  This is in contrast to another John Hughes classic, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  The setting and plot of Ferris Bueller are constantly on the move, whereas in The Breakfast Club we have five kids in a library doing nothing but getting to know each other and themselves.  They think they know each other at the start of the day, and you think they know them at the start of the movie, but by the end they realize they're all a combination of nerd, princess, athlete, outcast, and criminal.  

Hope you enjoyed our first post.  Join us next week for Grosse Pointe Blank!