Onions
A work in progress.
In a rice cooker, combine:
The goal is to end up with tender, buttery, whole onions. Their layers should slide off each other at the touch of a fork. They should be slurpable.
The pasta adds calories and soaks up water. Some of it gets seared to the bottom of the pot (especially if it’s cooked with tuna). I like this.
But sometimes I eat the onions over toast instead.
Karin can’t stand onions, so when I cook this dish, I open the windows and turn on the ceiling fan.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Speed Is NOT a Die Hard Clone!” says my friend Andrew.
Turns out, Die Hard is basically just 12 Angry Men. An “everyman” vanquishes foes one at a time in a contained space.
This invites us to consider other riffs on the 12 Angry Men plot. (Actually, they precede 12 Angry Men.) (1) And Then There Were None. Murderers on an island get their comeuppance one at a time. The difference: there’s no “everyman”; the avenger is unknown. From this comes the “slasher” genre. (2) The Man Who Was Thursday. Anarchists are brought over to the side of law and order, one at a time. The difference: the location isn’t contained; the action spills over into several countries.
Those precedents are from the same century. What older ones might there be? Making this or that allowance, we might consider such questers as Jack the Giant Killer, and then Herakles, Odysseus, Beowulf, and Sinbad. Perhaps this would be straying too far.
The defining limitation appears to be how contained the setting is. 12 Angry Men has all the others soundly beaten along this dimension.
As for overcoming foes: in Kind Hearts and Coronets, an “everyman” bumps off, one by one, heirs to a coveted inheritance. If Thursday is kind-hearted and redemptive, KH&C is deathly cynical. You can support contrasting morals on the same frame.
I said Thursday’s setting isn’t contained, but, in a sense, it is: all the foes are together in an early scene, eating breakfast on the same veranda. And maybe spatial containment is just the most obvious kind. What matters is that there are foes one is given, as opposed to foes one seeks out. In 12 Angry Men, givenness is visceral because the foes are all in the same room, all story long. But there are other ways of depicting this. Foes can all show up for the same meal, or in the same family tree.
In a rice cooker, combine:
Yellow onions, peeled, 2
Water, 2/3 cup
Butter, 1 tbsp
Pasta (e.g., bowtie), 2–3 oz
Meat: bacon, 1–2 oz; tuna, canned, 5 oz; leftover fried chicken; or what have you
Seasoning: oregano, cayenne pepper, mustard, what have you
The goal is to end up with tender, buttery, whole onions. Their layers should slide off each other at the touch of a fork. They should be slurpable.
The pasta adds calories and soaks up water. Some of it gets seared to the bottom of the pot (especially if it’s cooked with tuna). I like this.
But sometimes I eat the onions over toast instead.
Karin can’t stand onions, so when I cook this dish, I open the windows and turn on the ceiling fan.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Speed Is NOT a Die Hard Clone!” says my friend Andrew.
Turns out, Die Hard is basically just 12 Angry Men. An “everyman” vanquishes foes one at a time in a contained space.
This invites us to consider other riffs on the 12 Angry Men plot. (Actually, they precede 12 Angry Men.) (1) And Then There Were None. Murderers on an island get their comeuppance one at a time. The difference: there’s no “everyman”; the avenger is unknown. From this comes the “slasher” genre. (2) The Man Who Was Thursday. Anarchists are brought over to the side of law and order, one at a time. The difference: the location isn’t contained; the action spills over into several countries.
Those precedents are from the same century. What older ones might there be? Making this or that allowance, we might consider such questers as Jack the Giant Killer, and then Herakles, Odysseus, Beowulf, and Sinbad. Perhaps this would be straying too far.
The defining limitation appears to be how contained the setting is. 12 Angry Men has all the others soundly beaten along this dimension.
As for overcoming foes: in Kind Hearts and Coronets, an “everyman” bumps off, one by one, heirs to a coveted inheritance. If Thursday is kind-hearted and redemptive, KH&C is deathly cynical. You can support contrasting morals on the same frame.
I said Thursday’s setting isn’t contained, but, in a sense, it is: all the foes are together in an early scene, eating breakfast on the same veranda. And maybe spatial containment is just the most obvious kind. What matters is that there are foes one is given, as opposed to foes one seeks out. In 12 Angry Men, givenness is visceral because the foes are all in the same room, all story long. But there are other ways of depicting this. Foes can all show up for the same meal, or in the same family tree.
