Food & a film

I feel I should be writing about the film we saw yesterday, “Les Miserables” and the subsequent meal, however I’m drawn to write about today’s meal, Spicy Tortilla Lasagne.

I know it sounds rather odd but we have had it before & enjoyed it. I’m back to using up from the freezer, which always tends to mean digging up old favourites or doing some rather more imaginative recipes. This is one such.

The first item on my freezer contents list is half a packet of tortillas. The problem is that they have broken up over their stay in the freezer as items have been thrown on top. They’re far too broken up to use them as wraps. This recipe is the ideal solution.

Essentially the idea is to use tortillas instead of lasagne. So, I line the dish with a couple of tortillas, or what I guess is about 1½-2 tortillas. This I top with essentially a chilli con carne mix, then another tortilla (or rather a layer of tortilla crumbs), more chilli, another tortilla (crumbs in this case), more chilli. Come this evening I will add a topping of breadcrumbs & bung it all in the oven to warm up. A nice easy meal for supermarket shopping day, and a couple of fewer things in the freezer – the tortillas & some minced beef.

I suppose I know ought to return to yesterday. I have to admit that if we hadn’t seen the London stage performance of Les Mis I think I would feel quite differently about the film. Inevitably I made the mistake of comparing the two, or even three when I think of other non-musical films & the TV series starring Frank Finlay in 1967 based on the famous Victor Hugo novel. Personally I found the music fresher, the ending more poignant on stage. The film, though, did enable you to see the expression on the actors’ faces in the way you couldn’t on stage. Generally this was an advantage. The exception was in the case of Russell Crowe whose eyes seemed to be telling a different story from the tale he was telling. In this regard I think Anthony Perkins did the best job as Javier in his non-musical version of the tale. He caught the manic obsessionalism of the character in his eyes.

After the film we decided to try the Thai restaurant that opened in Morecambe a few years ago. We’d never been before. Usually we eat out with friends who are nervous of the idea of Thai food, or we are out of the town centre so tend to eat out of the town centre too.

We found the food disappointing – not exactly bad, just disappointing. We both tried a soup, the Fox going chicken while I went king prawn. We both were put out by the amount of inedible matter in the soup – bits of rock hard lemon grass, curry leaves, slices of hard root ginger, and in my case, the shells that still encased the prawns.

We followed it with a couple of stir fries, the Fox went for a spicy chicken & mushroom one, while I went for a sweet & sour chicken one. We both found our meal okay, but we found we were bored before we’d finished the quantity.

I suspect we won’t be going there again. If we do, we would certainly be choosing different dishes!

However, despite the disappointments, it made a very agreeable change from our normal routine & a bit of a morale boost. And ultimately that’s what we wanted & that’s what we found.