Chicken Run

The Netflix subscription is having its hoped-for effect; pizza-and-a-movie night is becoming a semi-regular event, giving me both excuses to make pizza (which I love to do) and a chance to finally see movies that I've been meaning to get around to for years and years.

Such as Chicken Run. There's a thousand sites out there that can tell you the plot, so all I want to say is that we thoroughly enjoyed it, and I was wondering up to the end just how things were going to fall out (I mean, I knew the chickens were going to win, but just how that would happen I wasn't certain of). The movie gets full marks for style, humor, and likeability. I think L liked it, too, at least I'm pretty sure that she said she wanted to watch it again on Sunday.


JJ is old enough now to be mesmerized by the TV, making it occasionally difficult to give him supper (one reason I love our place's open floor plan, I can sit with him by his high chair at the kitchen table and still watch the movie). He had some sort of Gerber mac and cheese for dinner and seemed to like it okay, but we need to put him on regular table foods (hoping to avoid what we're going through with his sister...). He had a rough night, and is up now, so I'm going to have to cut this short!

Dinner and a Movie: Ratatouille

Every once in a while we have a movie night here. It's traditionally been an MST3K episode to celebrate the end of some long week or other with minimally brain-straining fare, but we've recently decided to experiment with Netflix and see if our hectic lives can support actually watching something new once in a while. We inaugurated the experiment with Ratatouille, a movie everyone I know liked. Now that I've seen it, I'm not sure how I went so long without it. I mean, I knew it had something to do with cooking, but has any other animated film in history given a visual shout-out to Microplane? My admiration for the Pixar crew continues to expand; they get so many details right. L, surprisingly to me, lost interest after a while, but a lot of it was pretty well over her head, too. It may be that a second viewing would draw her in.

Along with the movie we had pizza. I have been working on my pizza for a while now. I use a basic pizza dough recipe from Cooking Light, purchased sauce, lots of cheese, peppers, mushrooms, and pepperoni. To the sauce I add some Italian herb mix and crushed red pepper. Bake it on a pizza stone (now that I've finally learned how to get it on the stone rather than the oven floor--parchment paper!) for about twenty minutes. Resorting to delivery pizza has become an option accepted with a resigned grimace.