Announcing the 2022 Red Carpet Menu!
Welcome to this year’s announcement of the 2022 KitchAnnette Red Carpet Menu!
This is SOME LIST of movies nominated for Oscar® Best Picture! Although they all HAVE to be in movies theaters for a bit of time to qualify, only a couple of them were exclusively in the theaters. Many of the most popular streaming services have presented stellar selections, with Netflix having 2 movies on the Best Picture list. As of this posting, I believe only Drive My Car and Licorice Pizza are still exclusively in theaters.
They opted to nominate TEN movies, which makes for a very extensive menu. The theme? Mid-Century Dinner Party! It’s the vibe I was feeling when having looooong conversations with my fellow menu maniacs and where it seemed to go.
I give you the 2022 KitchAnnette Red Carpet Menu!
Appetizers:
CODA is my favorite movie on the list. Yes… I play favorites! It’s not as corny as it may seem initially by far. Also, two years in a row, hearing and deafness has been prominent in Best Picture nominated films with last year’s excellent Sound of Metal. Well, when you have a family of fishers in Massachusetts and the focus in on the CODA, what else can the dish be but COD-A! Delicious bites of cod fish elevated to be sought on the trays of the swankiest cocktail parties.
Don’t Look Up is a “save the planet” film that masterfully uses a comet and the polarized climate of the American political misinformation machine to mirror the climate crisis. As you may see being created over the last few years, simple science is leaked into the general public but the spin from either side misses the critical points and become puffed up and swallowed by the audience they sought to influence. That is how we get to Dough’d Leek Cup. Little puffs of leek that will have a subtle and appealing flavor that will go down deliciously. Ha!
Soup/Stew:
The Power of the Dog is a gorgeously shot movie by incredible film maker, Jane Campion. We’ve got two brothers, a cattle ranch, a new wife, her son, too much booze, and lots of unexpressed rage and emotion. Well, at least on the surface. And so we have The Power of the Bourg, my version of Beef Bourguignon, our very first Oscar stew. Between the cattle ranch and the booze, it is a delicious option. It simmers and gets richer with each minute of undaunted heat. Yum!
Main Course:
West Side Story is a classic based on the classic, Romeo and Juliet. Add a couple of gangs separated by culture and the feeling of ownership and belonging in the most urban city of them all, NYC, then sprinkle in a love-at-first-sight dynamic with a seemingly “chicken” white dude and a spicy Puerto Rican beauty and we’ve got this year’s dish, Spicy Roasted Chicken Breast or Breast Side Story!
Side Dishes:
Nightmare Alley is the latest Guillermo del Toro film and features a stellar cast. No surprise there! Bradley Cooper is a carny… a carnival worker… who encounters quite the group and learns how to seemingly read minds from tarot-card reader, Toni Collette and her husband, David Strathairn. Nightshade Alley features fruits and veggies in the nightshade category but I’m swapping out the potato for TARO(t) root. This is gonna be goooooood.
Belfast comes to us from Kenneth Branagh. It is a semi-autobiographical film exploring the dynamic between Protestants who were going after Catholics and those who believed in live and let live in a tight-knit Belfast neighborhood in the late 1960’s. Bellmash takes two flavors, bell peppers and potatoes, and mashes them together for only the most harmonious and heavenly results.
Salad:
Licorice Pizza is a film that takes two mostly sweet characters that you wouldn’t think go together, and through many chopped bits of their interactions, marinates a connection between them. Licodiced Pieces does much the same with two ingredients, oranges and fennel, and a light viniagrette. What… did you think I was going to go literal? A pizza? Licorice? Come on… ha!
Desserts:
Drive My Car is a Japanese film that features disappointing people, death, and a lot of driving in a Saab (sob). It was THREE hours long – a loooooong trip to get to the end. Hive MaCaron is yes, I admit it, a HUGE stretch. Without much food, featuring actors and drivers and writers… tragedy, accidents, etc. the wheels fell right off in coming up with this. So salted (from the sob/Saab-ing) honey macarons seem a great treat to turn the tears around.
King Richard was not what I expected. This man, Richard Williams, had the unwavering plan (not dream) to see two of his daughters, Venus and Serena, be tennis world champions. And boy was he right! Bing Richtart is a cherry POP tart pastry honoring this pop who wouldn’t be dissuaded from his goals. I thought it would be a “tennis” movie but it was merely the backdrop for this incredible man to thrive despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
Dune is a remake that features an arid desert planet that is the only source of melange, or “the spice”, a very valuable substance. I agree, only I am thinking of other spice! And so we have Dunuts, sugar-sanded donuts filled with spiced chocolate. Just like the Fremen, the chocolate is under cover.
Ten nominations, ten dishes. Menu? A wacky mid-century dinner party indeed. And those recipes will be coming towards you in the next couple of weeks so you can be ready for the Academy Awards® on Sunday, March 27.
Annette
