My family loves to watch the Oscars as they happen. They like award shows generally but the Oscars with special intensity. I mostly love only to hear about what people dish about the next day: the joke that went wrong, the dance number that was tasteless or wonderful, the worst and best outfits, the strange celebrity reactions. Sometimes I get called into the room for the most spectacular moments, like the Will Smith slap or the “La La Land” debacle.
I peeked in for Ryan Gosling’s “Ken” number and a few other moments, like Kimmel reading Trump’s TruthSocial message. I found the In Memoriam segment annoying this year since the producers inexplicably decided it was better that we see the screens from a distance, as if we were in the audience at the venue. I missed some other moments, like John Cena’s “costume”, but not to worry, the Academy Awards broadcast is the ultimate in paratextuality: whatever you don’t see, you’ll get to see. Unless it’s whatever was behind Cena’s envelope, that is.
Nothing this year pissed me off in terms of outcomes, at any rate, though it is always interesting to read lists of past snubs to recall just how laughably and infuriatingly off the people who vote have been at times. The worst remains “Driving Miss Daisy” instead of “Do the Right Thing”, which didn’t even get nominated: that’s still some peak white bullshit that is impossible to forget even this many years later.
Because the awards are a big deal at Chez Nous, I worked up a few things for weekend eats. I had two frozen ribeyes that needed to be used, and I decided I felt like making a hotpot built around thin-shaved pieces of the ribeyes.
Slicing paper-thin pieces off the frozen ribeyes while they were still mostly frozen took some care and patience, but I managed it pretty well—you want the slices to be really thin so that they cook properly in the hot broth. To make the starter broth, I used a beef bone I had in the freezer and some onion, then I added sake, soy sauce, rice vinegar and sesame oil to finish it. The overall goal is to have the broth get richer and richer as you go along adding thin slices of beef and then to dump some vegetables in at the end. I made the mistake of not having a little dip sauce for the beef as it came out so it was a bit bland but it was still sort of fun. Then mushrooms, bok choy, napa cabbage and green beans for the soup, which worked very well.
I really love these kinds of meals, where there’s something that everybody is doing in stages throughout and where you can substitute what goes in the hotpot depending on what you have or what looks good.
For Oscar night, I made a bunch of small things: some homemade fried mozzarella sticks (a complicated prep, actually), a little pate sandwich (going with an interesting pate I hadn’t seen before in the store), a salad with olives and fried chickpeas, and then little ground venison sliders with harissa on top.
Came out very well—fun food that could be eaten on the couch while watching celebrities on the carpet.
Though if I’d known about Cena’s plans, I could have made those Irish bangers I have in the fridge instead.
Speaking of which, however, I also used the weekend to get my annual homemade corned beef off and running. It’s a good thing that pink preservative salt doesn’t go bad, because I only use it about twice or three times a year and the big bag I bought quite some time ago is still more than half full at that. The key thing for the corned beef, I think, is to use a distinctive mix of pickling spices rather than a generic store-bought range. This year I put coriander, black pepper, bay leaves, whole dried chilis, green cardamom and cumin seed in along with some garlic cloves, as well as a big curl of lime rind.
We will see how that goes.
Thanks for the delish food that complemented our Oscar viewing. BTW a few news outlets did give us a behind the scenes view of Cena who was - shock - not actually naked on stage.