Pomme Frites and Other Little Belgian Things I Love

It was not a fluke!

Last night I prepared duck breasts for dinner again, using the method I wrote down in a previous post, and it came out perfectly again! Yay! Yay for consistency and not being full of sh*t.

Another thing I learned in the East Village last night:
No matter how interesting and chipotle or sun-dried-tomato filled your mayo is, it REMAINS MAYONNAISE and therefor should not be considered an appropriate dipping sauce for your piping hot Pomme Frites. I must remember this and not break down when I see the giant board full of interesting-sounding sauces and panic trying to decide before it's our turn in line and think the first bite is super yummy and then realize I basically have a plastic cup of mayo in my hand.
Deezguzting.
The fries themselves, however, are delish. And stayed hot all the way to the 8th street R stop on a chilly night, so extra points for that. But I just have to come to terms with the fact that I am now, and always will be, a fries-with-ketchup girl.

What can I say? I'm a Classic.

No other Saturday Fun to report on tho... just sucky grownup stuff like cleaning the humidifiers, and checking out pawn shops in search of my stolen jewelry, and checking our health insurance policy to figure out how the hell to cover the cost of the lab work that essentially said I was a walking coronary... stuff like that.

Maybe for a treat Mike and I will hit the local library and see if I can't find some more old Hercule Poirot mysteries. There is one perk to having a terribly memory. No matter how many times I watch a Hercule Poirot mystery on TV, I (almost) never remember whodunnit. The little villages are all similar, and the actors are frequently recycled, or I know them from other period pieces (say, a Miss Marple), and so I confuse one story with another and so don't remember who the killer is. Or if I do, I don't remember the how, and so I can enjoy Poirot's little ego-trip at the end in which he explains all :) So no matter what book I find at the library, I probably won't remember how it ends because I don't pay attention to the names when watching, just faces. Plus, either way, I enjoy watching (or envisioning) David Suchet as Papa Poirot.

THAT is a point I feel strongly about.
I very much like Peter Ustinov as an actor, and he will always be close to my heart as the voice of the cowardly Prince John in the animated Robin Hood, but he just is not Hercule Poirot. He had the good fortune to portray Poirot in two fantastic, star-studded movies: Evil Under the Sun (my fav) and Death on the Nile (Maggie Smith is in both as well. If you have not seen them, Netflix them. Classics.) and apparently even a few TV mysteries in the 80's... but he is not the exacting little Belgian. Wonderful to watch, yes. Fit Agatha Christie's description of Hercule Poirot, not quite.
And I don't even want to THINK about the growling, hunched-over Albert Finney performance in Murder on the Orient Express... good grief. He looks and acts more like Hitler with a Hernia than Hercule.
(shrugging that off...)

<--- Papa Poirot says "Non"

David Suchet has really mastered the look, persona, and mannerisms of Hercule Poirot, and I delight in watching his performances. (He is also a fabulous actor in general, who pulls off whatever ethnicity is thrown at him. Look him up.)

And I keep hearing whispers of remaking Murder on the Orient Express with David Suchet (not just in video game form, please...) so I REALLY hope that comes off. Hell, they can even re-cast Lauren Bacall and Sean Connery from the Albert Finney one. Probably not as the same characters tho...

Well, IMDB certainly got a workout from me this morning. And now I must attend to the aforementioned sucky grownup stuff.
Tomorrow: Teriyaki Hanger Steak! (And I guess the Oscars)

Note From The Future: They DID remake "Murder On the Orient Express" with David Suchet, and it showed on Masterpiece Mystery in July of 2010, so if you're a fan, I'm sure you can look it up!