Well, I’m going to knuckle under and get a carbon steel wok (and maybe do the book again next week). A couple of readers pointed me to a reliable product that is also endorsed by Wirecutter.
Not that my old beast of a wok failed, really, but I’m persuaded.
The moo shu pork looked and tasted like a good version of the classic. I didn’t add additional mushrooms as López-Alt recommends for his version of the recipe, as I had some already-roasted pork shoulder I wanted to use up. The dried tree ear mushrooms you can buy that come packed into a teeny brick always astonish me—one small box will fill most of a large bowl after rehydration. Dried day lillies also are kind of a revelation—the first time I made my own hot-and-sour soup with them in it, I was like so that’s what that is. It’s not really taste they add as much as texture, in moo shu pork as well.
I took advantage of López-Alt’s invitation to do what strip-mall Chinese restaurants do for the Mandarin pancakes and used store-made flour tortillas, which worked fine. There’s something about these kinds of unleavened wrappers in a lot of different cuisines where if they’re not the absolute star of the show, I hate to invest a ton of effort in making them.
The dan dan noodles came out really well. I just bought some new sichuan pepper recently, and López-Alt explains in the cookbook what the situation was with for a while—I bought some during the period where you really couldn’t get the good stuff and wondered what the big deal was. The pepper I bought was the good stuff and you can really taste it in the dish in a good way.
The one down side to a wok as a singular cooking device, notably, is that you can’t cook more than one dish at a time, and wok cookery is usually the kind you want to serve right away on completion. So it took a bit of thinking about how to do this. One way would have been to just boil the noodles and fresh vegetables in a conventional pot, but what I did this time was just finish the moo shu, wipe out the wok, and then bring water quick on the boil for the rest, with the coating for the dan dan already made.
We also saw the new Ant-Man film, Quantumania, over the weekend. It’s not as bad as the mainstream reviewers say—I liked it better than Thor: Love and Thunder, which I absolutely loathed, and it’s better than a few other lesser Marvel films. But it’s not exactly good, either. It’s just kind of boring.
Marvel Studios has gotten by so far on two major strategies. The first is to broaden out the range of genre references and directing styles from their original more leaden offerings, often along the way making better use of the range of their casting choices for the heroes (while continuing to struggle consistently throughout with antagonists, both in casting and in writing). The second is to use the really elemental hook of “and then what happened?” to get audiences to show up for the next installment.
Both of these strategies are deeply rooted in the source material. Superhero comic-books are a kind of omnivorous scavenger of all genres as much as they are a genre of their own: they indiscriminately eat up mysteries, thrillers, war stories, melodrama, romance, space operas, etc. And as serial fiction, they have always depended on the next issue! you won’t believe what happens! box on the final page, all the more so since more sophisticated styles of subplotting became common from the 1970s onward.
At some point, as a strategy of making cinematic entertainment, those two strategies are going to be insufficient. At a point like Quantumania, perhaps. [Spoilers from here on if that matters.] The basic plotline here is “superheroes arrive as strangers in a community of refugees and resistance fighters who are trying to hide from a remorseless conqueror who also hails from elsewhere; after initially trying to avoid getting involved, superheroes end up leading the resistance to victory.”
I could fill a couple of long boxes of superhero comic-books that are based on that plot structure, even if I were just restricted to other dimensions and sub-atomic worlds. Polemachus, the Negative Zone, the Microverse, K’ai, the Dark Dimension, Limbo, Tunnelworld and many more just from Marvel alone. At some point, it just isn’t enough of a story, even if the incidental refugees and resistance fighters are made interesting or become part of the protagonist’s supporting cast in a slightly more sustained way. (For example, the character Jarella, who became the Hulk’s romantic partner for a while, in a kind of dress rehearsal of the storyline “Planet Hulk” that informed the film Thor: Ragnarok.) Even when there’s a “and then what happened” in the form of an antagonist who is going to show up in future films, it’s not enough. Even when that antagonist is as interesting and well-played as Jonathan Majors’ version of Kang the Conqueror.
At some point, along with “and then what happened?” and genre mobility, the Marvel movies are going to have to tell better stories. The kind that don’t end with fights involving thousands and lots of CGI, the kind that don’t have predictable beats, the kind where characters and plots alike take unexpected turns.
Just as an example, I can imagine a version of Quantumania that is not about Ant-Man and his allies, but where the central character is Kang, where the entire film is his POV. We start with him being exiled to the Quantum Realm. He meets a stranger who helps him rebuild his ship. She gets a flash of his thoughts and betrays him, despite his offer to help her. He is patient, because he understands what it means to have all the time in the world. He struggles against the warring, chaotic, brutal denizens of this realm, trying to build something better over their squalid waste and violence. His former friend betrays him again and again, but he’s determined to keep struggling to restore what was his. And then the traitor escapes. Another one from the outer world arrives, badly wounded. He rebuilds him and learns more from him about the possibility of drawing his rescue into the world.
Etc: imagine everything that happens in the movie only it’s from Kang’s perspective all along. It’s an uncomfortable thought for Disney, I’m sure, but not at all unprecedented for Marvel Comics, where there have been a number of successful attempts at making villains into anti-heroes, which usually results in them being far better villains on the next turn of the screw. A movie where Ant-Man is an outsider to someone else’s story, a bug on someone else’s windshield, where all his predictable domestic concerns are hopelessly banal and repetitive, where even the arrival of technologically-advanced warrior ants is just one more ridiculous obstacle the universe is determined to throw at Kang but that he’ll find a way to survive, somehow?
Anyway, it’s not the only way to freshen it up, but the air in the Marvel Studios films has gotten very stale even for people who love superheroes. Time to do unexpected things, to do better and more human character work, to shake it up.
I would eat that food, but I don’t need to see that film. My capsule review.