This Week’s Film: The Ramen Girl
Cuisine: Japanese

Each week, I feature an Asian film and create a recipe from the cuisine of that country. This week, it’s The Ramen Girl, a food film from Japan, with a ramen recipe to go with it.

Join me throughout the week for a closer look at the food and the film. My recipe and film review will be posted at the end of the week.

This Week’s Film: Apocalypse Now
Cuisine: Vietnamese

With its strong French-colonial influences, Vietnam is known for its excellent French-style baguettes. In Vietnamese they’re called banh mi, and the baguettes are used to make a variety of meat and vegetable sandwiches, also simply called banh mi. This version is made with spicy vegetable slaw and savory pork meatballs.

Here is a link to the Recipe and Photo on ThingsAsian.

This Week’s Film: Apocalypse Now
Cuisine: Vietnamese

I always marvel at how certain films of major significance have eluded me for years after their release. Of course, I’ve never been one to flock to the box office, especially since the invention of VCRs and DVDs. I much prefer to watch movies at my leisure, in the comfort of home, where I can pause the film to make a comment, ask a question, fetch a snack, look something up on the Internet, or take a bathroom break. And with the proliferation of films available for home viewing, especially via Netflix, there are still so many films that I’ve yet to see.

Among them are Schindler’s List, the vintage classics It Happened One Night and Gaslight, I’ve never seen a single film by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini, and believe it or not…Apocalypse Now. But that’s finally about to change, now that my son Will and I have plans to watch it together this weekend.

My film review will be posted at the end of the week, along with my Banh Mi recipe.

This Week’s Film: Apocalypse Now
Cuisine: Vietnamese

As always, I’m looking for a dish that I’ve yet to try, and one that springs to mind is the Vietnamese-style sandwich known as Banh Mi. The name simply means baguette, but it seems that there are endless variations upon the theme.

A basic description of Banh Mi would be: a French baguette, split lengthwise and filled with various meats, vegetable toppings, and condiments, which leaves it quite open to interpretation. So I will be conducting more detailed research to decide on the combination of fillings and condiments that I will use for my own version.

My Banh Mi recipe will be posted at the end of the week, along with my Apocalypse Now film review.

This Week’s Film: Apocalypse Now
Cuisine: Vietnamese

Although Vietnamese cuisine is unique, it has evolved over many centuries from Chinese, Indian and French Colonial influences. Vietnam is also distinctly regional, from the cooler northern region, the rich cultural Hue region in the center, and the tropical southern region, each with its own indigenous vegetables, seafood, and wildlife; each with its own style and spice.

Northern cuisine is lighter and less pungent, the cuisine of the central Hue region, once the site of the ancient capital, is flavorful and elaborate, while the southern region falls under the influence of Chinese cuisine, with more pungent spices and stir-fry techniques. The southern region is also the melting pot of French and Indian influences characterized by curries and European ingredients such as bread, potatoes, asparagus, shallots, and fine herbs.

My Vietnamese recipe will be posted at the end of the week along with my Apocalypse Now film review.

This Week’s Film: Apocalypse Now
Cuisine: Vietnamese

Synopsis: Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning Vietnam War Era interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness stars Marlon Brando as a mentally deranged army colonel who has gone AWOL in the Cambodian jungle, and Martin Sheen as the officer who is sent to track him down and kill him.

Join me throughout the week on Chopstick Cinema for a closer look at the food and the film. My film review will be posted at the end of the week, along with my Vietnamese recipe.

This Week’s Film: Apocalypse Now
Cuisine: Vietnamese

Each week, I feature an Asian film and create a recipe from the cuisine of that country. This week, it’s a classic: Apocalypse Now, and a Vietnamese dish to go with it.

Join me throughout the week for a closer look at the food and the film. My recipe and film review will be posted at the end of the week.

This Week’s Film: Fire
Cuisine: Indian

Dysfunctional doesn’t begin to describe the family dynamics in this sexually charged drama written and directed by Deepa Mehta.

Here is a link to my Film Review on ThingsAsian.

This Week’s Film: Fire
Cuisine: Indian

This colorful curry is seasoned with a blend of earthy Bengali spices and vibrant aromatics that bring the flavor of the plump, meaty catfish filets to life. Served with a classic rice pilaf, it’s a memorable main course for an Indian meal.

Here is a link to the Recipe and Photo on ThingsAsian.

This Week’s Film: Fire
Cuisine: Indian

I’ve always loved curry in all its various interpretations, but for most of my life, I used only commercially blended curry powders to make curry at home. However, in the five years that I’ve been creating recipes for Chopstick Cinema, I’ve learned a lot about curries and curry powder:

The term curry is not synonymous with curry powder. The term curry is actually a classification of cooking techniques for any of a number of meat and vegetable dishes flavored with a wide variety of spices. Curry powder is a general term for the various spice blends that are often used to flavor curries. However, not all curries contain curry powder, and although the word curry may be strongly associated with Indian cuisine, curry is not unique to India. Many Asian cuisines feature their own unique styles of curry, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, all of which are flavored with their own traditional spice blends.

First introduced to the English language during the British Colonial era in India, the word ‘curry’ is an anglicized pronunciation of the Tamil word kari (also karhi and curriel), a thick, spicy sauce. While each region of India has its own style and spice, since the introduction of curry powder to the West, the flavor of most commercially prepared curry powders has become rather standardized, and are generally available in two styles, standard, and spicy Madras.

A commercial curry powder may contain twenty or more spices, including black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel seed, fenugreek, ginger, garlic, mace, mustard seeds, nutmeg, poppy seeds, red pepper, saffron, sesame seeds, tamarind and turmeric, which gives curry powder its ruddy yellow color.

In India, curry powders from southern regions tend to be spicy, while those from the northern regions are milder. And when the individual spices are freshly ground, their flavors are more pungent.

Another Indian spice blend is garam masala, which means hot spice paste or blend. These blends tend to include spices that are characteristically ‘warm’ in flavor and aroma, and are usually added at the end of the cooking process to preserve their pungency.

Garam masala is similar to curry powder, but with a more specific set of ingredients. Although it varies according to region and individual cooks, a common garam masala blend includes cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, and black pepper. Other ingredients may include black or white peppercorns, bay leaves, coriander, cumin, long pepper, mace, nutmeg, and star anise.