Kitchen Zink - Disaster!!!

I love Rick Bayless, I really do.  But for some reason his food and my kitchen just do not seem to get along.  For those who don’t know Rick, he’s a celebrity chef type, owning the popular Frontera restaurant in Chicago.  Frontera has since branched out into salsas that you can buy at the store, and his TV show, Mexico: One Plate at a Time is on PBS and is really good.  Rick’s thing is Mexican food, and he is incredibly energetic about it to the point that it’s pretty infectious.  Add in how much I love Mexican food, and cooking from Rick’s recipes seems like a no-brainer.

The first effort was the Super Bowl carnitas.  There were a lot of problems here, few (if any) of which were directly Rick Bayless’s fault.  First, there was the bad mojo we incurred by not making Nachos as Big as Your Head on Super Bowl Sunday, as we have every year we’ve been together.  Then we had to use mediocre pork, since it was winter and we couldn’t easily get nice local stuff.  And carnitas is made from pork shoulder, which is fatty as heck to begin with, so it was a lower quality cut of a factory farmed pig.  And finally, the smallest pork shoulder we could find at Hy-Vee was like 5 lbs, so we had a ton of it.

The final product was quite tasty, though.  We made a tomatillo salsa, had some real Mexican cheese, some sour cream, and used authentic corn tortillas.  It was great… for the first three tacos.  Then we looked at our pile of meat and saw it was nearly as big as when we had begun!  Each of us was stuffed and we had hardly made a dent in the carnitas.  So over the next week, everything was carnitas.  And as tasty as some carnitas is, when you eat fatty pork every day, you do start to feel gross.  Much as I hate to waste food, in the end we just got damn sick of eating carnitas.  That was in February.

Fast-forward to this week, meal-planning time, and we’re on the subject of seafood.  We’ve had salmon (oily fish) last week, so non-oily or shellfish were an option.  We start bandying about ideas, and Stacia comes up with a great one.  There are ads all over the place for shrimp tacos lately – why not make our own?  The only question is how to season the shrimp so we get some zip to them.  I scour my cookbooks, peruse the usual websites, and eventually hit upon a recipe of Rick Bayless’s that I literally can’t even find as I write this – maybe it’s gone from the internet!  Anyway, all systems go, let’s make some shrimp tacos.

At the store we pick up some wild US shrimp (Seafood Watch “Good Alternative”) and a few very pale looking tomatoes – more about them later.  Cilantro, tortillas, cheese and we’re on our way back home.  The first step was to roast everything.  Four cloves of garlic, in their skins in a pan.  I’d never done this before, but it did roast them up and soften them.  Pretty neat, actually.  Then some onion, also dry, in a pan until it turned a little dark.  And we did the usual broiler method of roasting the sad little tomatoes.  As I worked on this, Stacia made the one appetizing result of the meal, some very tasty guacamole.  Kudos, Stacia!

Meanwhile, everything of mine had roasted and been peeled, which was normal except for the tomatoes which had now lost all of their red color and were orangey-pinky mushy blobs.  Rick says coarsely blend it all in the food processor, so who am I to argue?  Now I have a pulpy orangey-pinky mixture with white specks, which I’m supposed to cook in a hot pan until it darkens and thickens.  Dutifully I press on, add some chipotles in adobo sauce, and finally throw in the shrimp as directed.  Looking into my pan, I start to have a bad feeling about what we’re making.

Because, and I apologize for being gross, but it looks like I am literally cooking shrimp in vomit.  But we’ve come this far: we’ve got cooked shrimp, a slaw we made earlier, yummy guacamole, cheese and tortillas.  At this point, sometimes you just have to say that you’ll try to eat the barfy shrimp.  So we did.  And you know what the surprising thing is?  Well, no, actually there wasn’t much surprise, because they tasted about how they looked.  Not sure if it was just very very poor tomatoes, the huge amount of garlic, or the addition of ground cloves to the sauce, but it was just quite unpleasant to eat.  Of course it didn’t look pretty, but wrapped up in a tortilla we could kind of avoid that aspect.  We each at 1 taco and most of a second (amazingly), before we decided to quit while we were ahead.

So you might think this was an abject failure, right?  Well, technically it was, since we made awful food.  But on the other hand, you can always learn from failures.  And in this case, I don’t think the lesson is that you need better tomatoes, or a little less clove, or you shouldn’t eat food that it looks like someone threw up, though those are all good lessons.  I think the bigger moral of this story is that recipes aren’t infallible.  I have no doubt that when Rick Bayless makes this meal, it tastes fantastic.  But that shouldn’t make me assume that his directions are perfect and following them rote is the way to go.

I am absolutely not a chef, and to a certain extent I’m not even sure I’m a cook.  The thing that I long to be able to do, and that I’ve been hesitant to try, is to be able to make up dishes on my own.  But if following directions leads me to vomitacos™ then maybe I can’t do much worse.  I need to do it in small steps, but disasters like these, strange as it may sound, make me think that perhaps I’ll be ready soon.  

Kitchen Zink - Spaghetti & Meatballs

Some days I get home and think to myself that there is no way that I feel like cooking.  Waking up at 6:30 in the morning, and then spending the day at my desk trying to figure out how the heck to do my job often leaves me tired out and I just want to flop on the couch, order a pizza and lounge around for the night.  You could call these days Mondays, for lack of a better word.

But some days, even if I’m wiped out, and on rare occasions because I’m wiped out, I very much do want to cook.  Cooking is my fun escape, and after a frustrating day it can be just the solace I’m looking for.  It’s hard to say for sure, but I’m hoping that these days are becoming more frequent as I develop better skills.

So it was a bit of a surprise, but not totally unexpected, when we arrived home after the drive from Dubuque to West Des Moines (3 ½ hours) and I immediately started thinking about what to make for dinner.  Add in that we’d dined out the entire weekend, and that Stacia was busy with catch-up schoolwork, and spending some time meal planning sounded pretty enticing.  On top of that, I had an insatiable craving for spaghetti, but really wanted to step outside the boil pasta, heat Ragu, and serve method.  So where to start?

The obvious solution (to me anyway) was Ellie Krieger and her Turkey Meatballs with Spicy Tomato Sauce and Whole Wheat Spaghetti.  I have had some sort of major food crush on Ellie lately, and in the past few weeks I have made at least three dinners out of her cookbook The Food You Crave.  Ellie’s a nutritionist, and her food philosophy of eating healthy whole natural foods, not depriving yourself, and avoiding bizarre chemical concoctions that reduce fat/calories is something I’m really on board with.  I have her book from the library, but will probably soon buy it since everything we’ve yet made out of it has been fantastic.  The cover, incidentally, shows her spaghetti and meatballs, so perhaps the book itself had been subliminally affecting my thoughts, but sometimes you just feel like spaghetti, darn it!

I ran to the store and grabbed some of the missing ingredients, allowing Stacia to get some work done before the tag-team cooking event began.  First we needed to make the meatballs, which were loaded with tons of tasty vegetables and greens: onion, garlic, carrot, parsley and thyme, to be precise.  It was a lot of chopping, I suppose, but strangely enough I enjoy that aspect of cooking, so it was kinda fun to get all the produce reduced down to size.  Then we mixed in an egg, some bread crumbs, and of course the ground turkey, and the delightfully squishy mass gradually got formed into balls to be baked in the oven.

While they baked, we made the sauce and pasta.  I suppose these were pretty straightforward, but there were some interesting twists.  The main one is that the sauce is a spicy tomato sauce, so we had a key ingredient to give things a little zip: chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.  I’d never heard of these until a year or two ago, but they are awesome little firecrackers.  The chipotles themselves are simply smoke-dried jalapenos, but they are then stewed in a zesty sauce of tomatoes, garlic, vinegar and spices to end up soft and rehydrated.  You can buy little cans of chipotles in adobo sauce in the Mexican section of any grocery store.

Now, chipotles in adobo pack a wallop.  I discovered this the first time I cooked with them, and engaged in my usual (bad) habit of licking the spoon.  Wow!  Very fiery, but if used in the right proportions with other ingredients, they lend a wonderful smoky zip that I don’t think you can replicate any other way.  Thankfully, Ellie only called for one diced pepper with the accompanying sauce, so I knew we weren’t about to be blown away by the spiciness.  Careful not to taste the peppers on their own, I minced one up and tossed it into the sauce.

Like I said, the rest was pretty simple.  Boil water and drop in some whole-wheat spaghetti.  Simmer the sauce together for a while.  When the meatballs had cooked for the allotted oven time, they were transferred into the saucepot to soak up some liquid and cook just a little more.  Miraculously, everything finished at the same time, and we were ready to plate.  Grate on a little bit of leftover Pecorino for a final flair, and it was dinnertime!  (Unfortunately it all looked so good, we just dug in without staging a photo!  But the picture on the web is probably prettier anyway).

As we ate, I decided that this may well be the best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten.  The meatballs were juicy and flavorful, which can be tricky to achieve with turkey.  I have to suspect the transfer from oven to sauce helped a lot with this aspect, so kudos to Ellie for that.  And instead of drab gray turkey, these were flecked with a colorful confetti of carrot and parsley, which made for a more visually appealing meal.

But as good as the meatballs were, I think the sauce even topped them!  Chunky and tomatoey, but with the little pinch of fire from the chipotles, it livened spaghetti up from what can be a very blah presentation.  I will say that it didn’t make a ton of sauce, which ordinarily might bother me (I tend to prefer a lot of sauce) but it really worked on this dish.  Rather than drowning the noodles in sauce, they were accented with it, providing just enough flavor with each bite without overpowering it.  And with the pecorino on top, there was a little added taste even sprinkled on the noodles without any sauce.

It was almost sad the other day when we finished up the leftover spaghetti, since it was simply so good.  It’s so much fun to make something so delicious, knowing at the same time that it’s really good for you.  As the front page of Ellie Krieger’s site says “To get people to eat well don’t say a word about health, just cook fantastic food for them.”  Not to get too full of myself, but I think this turned out being a fantastic meal.  For a day where I was tired out from driving, and really just craved spaghetti, it was a great way for things to turn out.  Easily a repeat recipe.

Skiing: Demon-sport of the insane and masochistic

(Okay, that title may have been slight hyperbole.)

Driving through the rolling hills above the city of Dubuque, Iowa, a strange sight rises out of the sodden cornfields of a mid-March morning.  The drab browns of dormant lawns and fields suddenly give way to a brilliant expanse to white.  Like a shipwrecked sailor clutching a plank for support, here in this tiny outpost, winter clings tight to a landscape where almost all other snow has finally melted away.  Even as the mercury rises near 50 degrees, one last winter wonderland can boast dozens of inches of snow depth.  This spot, Sundown Mountain, was our first stop on a long weekend escape.

I had never skied before, nor had I had much inclination to.  Scary stories of avalanches, hard crashes and ice spiders (kidding!) seemed enough to dissuade me.  Then, out of the blue, they decided to have a Winter Olympics, I decided to record every single event, and perhaps then the seed took root in my mind.  Totally separately, we decided on a long weekend trip to Dubuque, with several events and attractions in mind, but still a good many openings in the schedule.  Serendipitously, I stumbled upon the website for Sundown, and thought, “Why not?  Let’s give it a try.”

As a true amateur who had never been on skis, on a ski mountain, or even in a conversation about skiing, there was only one place to learn.  On Youtube.  Oh, sure, there were lessons available at Sundown, but they cost almost as much as the lift ticket/ski rental combo.  And with the wealth of “experts” putting videos online, it really was a much more frugal option.  Within minutes I was an expert on the difference between pizza and French fries, and considered myself ready to go.  We arrived at the mountain, and paid a moderately obscene amount for our day’s entertainment.

My ski boots were dead ringers for the magnetic gravity boots from Star Trek VI, and were probably just as much fun to walk in.  We stomped our way into the skis, and set about flailing around in the kiddie/beginner area.  After some experimenting, we felt ready to attempt the smallest hill, Sunshine.  It was tricky at first, but I remembered my extensive training, and soon felt confident in the “French fry position,” even doing some spiffy turns back and forth across the slope.  Granted, this slope was tiny, and didn’t even follow the main mountain, but I was feeling pretty good.

That meant it was time for Sunbowl, deceptively labeled “Easiest” on the hill map.  Stacia set off first, and then me, followed closely by trouble.  You see, in an attempt to slow the riders, Sunbowl was designed with a fairly sharp switchback shortly after the start.  As we approached, I saw Stacia attempt to turn, not succeed, and crash at the banked outside of the turn.  Not wanting to leave her alone (and also not capable of making the turn anyway), I followed suit.  Somehow I stayed on my feet up the banking, started to slide back and flopped down onto my face with my skis somehow angled out 90 degrees from my body.

With some work, I was able to extricate myself and get back onto my skis.  Stacia and I both thought little of this crash, since we knew the switchback was there, and the rest of the hill was more direct.  Unfortunately for us, it went directly downhill.  Once again Stacia set off first, I waited a moment and also got going.  And going, and going…  Legs firmly set in as big of a wedge (“pizza slice”) as I could, I found myself inexplicably gaining speed.  The wind whipped my eyes to tear up as I accelerated faster and faster, desperately trying to somehow slow myself down.

Then I crested a little hill and saw Stacia flat on her back on the middle of the ski run, looking for all the world like she was making a snow angel.  (Allegedly she crashed, but who knows? ;)  As I hurtled past at uncontrollable speed, I heard her yell “I’m okay!  Go ahead!”  Unable to appreciate the irony that she thought I could have stopped to check on her, I continued on to what felt like impending doom.  I was still going at what felt like an insane speed, but I could see I was approaching the bottom of the hill.  I was almost there.

Unfortunately, a diabolical set of circumstances arose to ruin my ski run from hell.  A man and his small child happened to be on the slope ahead of me, just as the run turned a gently S-curve.  Unable to slow down or really turn very well, I found myself heading straight for a light pole.  I could see it was padded, but I really didn’t want to hit it, so I decided it would be better to just crash.  Everything happened fast enough that I don’t know what I did to make myself crash, or what the crash was like, but somehow after the twists and spins I ended up on the snow, short of the light pole and separated from my skis by about three feet.

I found my way back into my skis, skied the few remaining yards down the hill and met up with Stacia, who had apparently gone by while I was getting my bearings.  We looked at each other and each said something like, “That was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done!”  In a daze, we rode the lift to the top of the hill, and returned to the baby hill for the rest of our time there.  Fortunately neither one of us hurt ourselves, but it was probably just luck, since you can really twist yourself up pretty well when you have three foot long planks attached to your legs.  Since luck had shined on us on our run down the Sunbowl, we decided not to tempt fate again that day.

As we left Sundown Mountain, I thought about the Winter Olympic athletes that had, in-part, inspired this trip.  I recall from the telecasts that the alpine skiers travel at something like 60 mph.  I have no idea how fast I was going, but have to imagine it wasn’t more than 20 or 30, and it was the scariest experience of my life.  With regard to skiing, I’m proud to say I’ve done it, and on a small enough hill it was actually pretty fun.  But I think the best way to participate in this sport is the way I did during the Olympics: from the couch.

Kitchen Zink - Weekly roundup

Is anyone surprised that my plan for a post every day lasted exactly two days before it ended up petering out?  I’m not really.  There’s a line between setting goals for my blog and making utterly unreasonable demands on myself, and saying I’d write here daily sets me well on the other side of the line, moving blogging from occasional respite to dreaded chore.  For some reason I’m preoccupied with defining exactly what I want this blog to be, forgetting that I started it just for the sake of writing every now and then as a sidebar from my very orderly and logical day job.  So, we’re gonna back things down here a little bit, and get back to my original intent.

In the past week or so, while I’ve been thinking things like “I need to write something about these burgers!” we have actually done some pretty cool cooking.  So today’s post is going to be the Cliff’s Notes version of the past week or so, and then the next entry might even be non-food related.  Who knows?  I sure don’t!  In the meantime, here’s what we’ve cooked lately:

Greek-style turkey (chicken) burgers – BHG cookbook (the red checkered one).  This is a recipe we’ve made a few times now, and it’s always awesome.  It’s a fairly simple turkey burger – we used chicken this time – with some presumable Greek spices and seasonings mixed in, cooked up on the handy George Foreman grill.  We picked up some pita pockets this time around, which made for a fun and mildly authentic wrapper for the burgers.  There’s a Greek salsa they have you make, comprised of cucumber, tomato, kalamata olive, and some vinegar and spices.  Put some of that into the pita with the burger, top with crumbled feta (yumm) and presto!  Greek burgers.  I love the way the salty feta and the sour but fresh salsa flavors mix with the lean burger patty.  It’s a great mix of flavors, and it’s going into our repeat repertoire.

Moroccan chickpea and vegetable stew – Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker.  I’ve never had real Moroccan food, made by real Moroccans, but every Moroccan-themed dish I’ve ever made has turned out great.  There’s a distinct set of spices they use, including cumin, cinnamon, paprika and turmeric, that meld into a really phenomenal and unique taste sensation.  Couple that with the fact that there’s usually some dried fruit (raisins, apricots, dates or similar) that add some sweetness to offset the spices, and I just wonder why this cuisine hasn’t taken off in the US.  Anyway, all that said, I thought this recipe was a little bland – maybe it needed a little higher quantity of the spice mixture for the amount of stew it made.  It was fine, I just thought it needed a little more punch.  However, I did accidentally use undrained tomatoes that should have been drained, so maybe it’s my fault things got diluted.  It’s a maybe re-try.

Homemade Mac and Cheese – Made up.  I always loved the restaurant-style macaroni and cheese, like the one you can get at Old Country Buffet or Bonanza.  I’ve also never liked the basic one from the box, made with fluorescent orange cheese powder.  I know you can buy boxes of the deluxe one, but it’s been an ongoing process to try to recreate it on our own.  We’ve had pretty good success using Velveeta, but wanted to try “real” cheese for once.  I did the whole process, making a roux of flour and butter, adding milk to make a white sauce, and then adding shredded cheese once it thickens.  Unfortunately, the Colby we used turned really gritty and grainy in the sauce, much like every other non-Velveeta attempt.  It may be time to bite the bullet and just stick with Velveeta, even though it is something like $5 a box.  It was interesting to find out, though, that Velveeta is made of real cheese rather than the horrible chemical concoction I was envisioning, so maybe it’s not so bad to just use it.

Avocado Frozen Yogurt – Fine Cooking magazine, Feb/Mar 2010.  We own an ice cream maker, and have made pretty good use of it, primarily following the recipes provided in the manual.  That’s slowed down a bit since it is winter right now, but I’d been itching to make some ice cream anyway when the last Fine Cooking showed up.  They had a feature on avocados (very good for you) and one of the recipes was for a frozen yogurt, which we just had to try.  This one was quite a bit more complicated than the ones Cuisinart came up with, and right in the middle of the process I discovered our avocados had gotten too old and were total mush.  So I had to: measure all ingredients and get ready, open avocados, throw avocados away, run to the store for more avocados, heat milk and sugar to boiling, add eggs, stirring constantly so they didn’t curdle, cook to a custard, mix in avocado, add lemon and lime juice and zest, cool in ice bath, pour into machine and run for half an hour to make ice cream.

A mere two hours after I started, we had avocado frozen yogurt!  :)  It was awesome, actually.  The avocado didn’t add a ton of flavor, but really made the ice cream smooth and creamy.  The lemon and lime flavors came through pretty strongly, giving it a very refreshing taste.  You probably wouldn’t want to eat a lot of it in one sitting, but as a light dessert, it was awesome.  It was a ton of work, for sure, but that doesn’t bother me when the end result is really good.  If it had been gross, I would have been ticked that it took me hours to make, but this way it was just a lot of fun.

The funny thing is, I’m not even all the way caught up with the past week’s notable meals yet.  There are two that I really liked, perhaps even more than the ones I’ve written about, but they have a common thread that lends itself to its own post sometime.  I will plan to write that on Wednesday of this week and have it posted Thursday at noon.  (Just kidding!)  Maybe it will happen, maybe not.  I’m not going to force myself and I’m not going to stress if it doesn’t happen.  That’s the plan… for now at least.

Jan/Feb Filmfest

Naturally you all remember this, but back in December I began a quest to watch all of the movies on the AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movies lists (both original and 10^th anniversary editions).  In that month, I made it through five movies and gave a small review of each.  Since I was gone from blogging through all of January, there was no movie review then, so this set of five is from Jan/Feb, and starting in March we’ll get back to five per month.  Again, these are ranked from my least favorite to most.

5) The Searchers (1956) – Two months in a row with Westerns at the bottom might actually indicate that I just don’t care for this genre.  It’s now been one each with the two big names of Westerns, Clint Eastwood and now John Wayne, and I didn’t like either.  As little sense as this might make, every time John Wayne spoke, he sounded like Ryan Stiles’ John Wayne impersonation from Whose Line is it Anyway, which I always assumed was exaggerated and cheesy.  Well, it kind of was, but apparently that was also how John Wayne acted, and it just made me laugh.  Plot-wise, pretty simple: John Wayne is out searching for his niece that was kidnapped by Comanches.  Aside from the whole Cowboys vs. Indians stereotypes, it was pretty long and drawn out, and it seemed that almost every problem was solved by John Wayne’s character having a lot of money and buying his way out of trouble.  On the plus side, the desert scenery was fairly pretty.

4) Bringing Up Baby (1938) – If they made this movie today, I have the awful feeling it would star Ben Stiller.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Stiller (in small doses) but he does have an almost trademarked style of movie: every thing that can possibly go wrong does go wrong for the bumbling protagonist.  It ends up being a lot of screaming and running around and not much real story or depth.  Cary Grant stars this time as more meek than bumbling, per se, but he runs into Katherine Hepburn and all sorts of crazy things start happening, mostly centered around a “tame” leopard.  There are funny parts and clever lines, but there are a lot of groaners too.  I really wanted to like it, since I like Hepburn and Grant, but it was just kind of tiring.  I shouldn’t give this movie too hard a time, since it was probably a pioneer in the genre of “screwball comedy” but a lot of the material seems a bit tired now.  It’s okay, but definitely not a favorite.

3) Do the Right Thing (1989) – On the flip side, this one surprised me.  Clicking over to the Wikipedia page shows the very corny looking movie poster, which for some reason reminded me of all sorts of bad comedy covers.  However, aside from some minor characters for comic relief, this is actually a serious movie, about serious issues.  It’s set in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn, and explores racial conflict during a summer heat wave.  Spike Lee wrote and directed the movie, and I think he does well balancing the different viewpoints – there aren’t really “good guys” or “bad guys” (except the police, who seem a bit caricaturelike to me, but may have been accurate for that time and place), there are just the residents trying to go about their lives, as tensions simmer up to a boiling point.  I liked the pacing as things built up, I liked the filming and the unique color effects used to convey the heat.  Some of the characters were a bit cartoony or one-dimensional, and I really wish Lee had not cast himself as the main character.  As good a director as he may be, he doesn’t seem to be a great actor.  It’s a good movie, but probably would have been better with some minor tweaks.

2) Blade Runner (1982) – Here’s another one that I thought for sure I’d like, but it ended up not fully living up to its potential.  Blade Runner combines so many things I like, a film noir feel, a science fiction setting, ethical ambiguities, impressive visuals, and an almost antihero reluctant protagonist.  The downfall for Blade Runner was the extreme length and need to draw everything out.  Granted, we’re talking about Ridley Scott here, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that it ran long, but I felt this could have been a great movie if he’d livened things up a bit or added more convolution to the plot.  Most of the developments of the story were pretty transparent, so we weren’t puzzling over what would happen next, simply waiting.  That said, I did like this movie, so the pacing wasn’t a fatal flaw, just something I wish had been done better.  It was beautifully filmed, and raised some interesting questions about what it is to be human.  And at the end, you’ve got a movie featuring a young Harrison Ford hunting rogue androids while contemplating the morality of it all – hard to go too wrong there.

1) Pulp Fiction (1994) – I made a bit of a mistake watching this one, but I’ve seen it enough times that it didn’t bias my judgment.  I recorded this off of AMC, which meant a lot of editing.  It’s not like it makes my day to hear 50 F-bombs in the course of two hours, but clumsily removing them really messes with the flow of the movie.  But like I said, I’ve probably seen this a dozen times, so I knew what was going on.  Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s only great movie, and has allowed him IMO to pass off a lot of junk as quality filmmaking.  This one is full of brutal violence, like all his films, but it’s balanced with a witty script that makes me laugh aloud even today, knowing the lines that are coming.  Weird as it might sound to say for a movie about gangsters, hitmen, drug dealers and users, this is actually a lot of fun.  I’m not sure there’s enough depth of character or story to really count as a great film, but if it’s on I’ll probably watch for at least a while.

Next month I get back on track with the following five movies.

95(2) – The Last Picture Show (1971)

94(1) – Goodfellas (1990)

93(1) – The Apartment (1960)

93(2) – The French Connection (1971)

92(1) – A Place in the Sun (1951)