10 Year / 100th Movie Night Celebration!

 

This month's movie night was a landmark event because it was the 10 year anniversary from my first movie night in March of 2015 and it also just so happened to be my 100th event. This was accidental and unplanned, but something that I knew I wanted to recognize.

If you are wondering how it was my 100th and not my 120th, which would make more sense since I host these monthly, there were different circumstances within the last 10 years where events needed to be postponed. The largest of these was during the covid epidemic when people were told to no longer meet up in groups. That was a long break. There were also some smaller breaks a couple times when I was in the process of moving and unable to host. For awhile there, I thought my 100th was going to fall a month before my 10 year anniversary. Then last year Hurricane Helene hit and took out all our power for awhile, so I had to postpone another event and that moved the 100th to align with the 10 year anniversary.

It was purely random chance that both milestones would line up, but I knew that I had to do something special for it. I talked to my regular guests and we decided that the best way to celebrate would to do a larger event with a trilogy of films. We discussed a couple and decided to do the Indiana Jones trilogy.

Now I had already done Raiders Of The Lost Ark five years ago, so I wanted this one to feel different and to stand out. Ultimately, I decided that since this would be a 3 movie event, I would space them out and instead of doing a break during the film, I would let the film play through to its entirety and would do our food breaks in between. For food, I decided to focus on the regions most highlighted in the films. Indiana is quite the world traveler, but Raiders Of The Lost Ark focuses a lot on Egypt and Temple Of Doom takes place in India. Since both of these are regions whose food we have never explored, I decided that I wanted to make an Egyptian inspired lunch and an authentic Indian dinner. I also had some dishes that were just general Mediterranean or Arabic inspired since a lot of time is spent in those areas during the first and third films.

I decided to split the day up as follows:

Noon - 1:30 Egyptian Inspired Lunch

1:30 - 3:30 Raiders Of The Lost Ark

3:30 - 5:00 Snacks & Games

5:00 - 7:00 Temple Of Doom

7:00 - 8:30 Indian Dinner

8:30 - 10:30 The Last Crusade

This layout made sure there was plenty of time to enjoy the films as well as the food and company. The entire event was going to be a little over 10 hours, which seemed fitting since it was celebrating 10 years, but 10 hours is pretty big ask for guests, so I made it a drop-in friendly event. I invited both regular guests and some former regulars with a very clear statement that they could come and go whenever it was convenient for them. My hope was that this flexibility would make it easier for former regulars to come by because many of them stopped coming due to changes in work or life circumstances. This approach did work as some people were only able to come by for an hour or so. Several people did stay for the whole event which was surprising to me, but great to see. I was afraid that I was going to have a lot of leftover food, but that ended up being the case because of how many people stayed allday.

Alright, lets talk about the food. I did some research on ancient Egypt and discovered that they were a bit of a melting pot of cultures because of all the trade they did with other countries. I also discovered that they ate a lot of fruit and grains, but didn't eat much meat. What meat they did eat was usually smoked or jerky. I also discovered that honey was a commonly used sweetener. All of this inspired my lunch dishes.

Smoked Harissa Wings w/ Spiced Honey Glaze

Originally, I was planning to make my own harissa spice blend using some recipes that I had found, but as I was at the grocery store, I discovered that several of the spices that I needed were not available. Thankfully, my grocery store did have a premade harissa spice blend for sale, so I used that.

Ingredients:

chicken wings

olive oil

harissa spice blend

honey

Tools Needed:

smoker

Directions:

1. Wash your chicken, pat dry with a paper towel, and move to a mixing bowl.
2. Mix in enough olive oil and harissa spice that all of the chicken becomes evenly coated.
3. Cover and refrigerate to let the chicken marinate. You can do this for as little as 30 minutes or overnight.
4. Prep your smoker and cook the chicken at 225º F for an hour. Then use some prongs to flip the wings and cook for an additional hour to hour and a half.
5. While the wings finish cooking, make a glaze by mixing honey with more harissa spice. If you have a basting brush, you can brush the honey glaze on your chicken towards the end of its cook. I would suggest glazing one side, letting it cook for 20 minutes then flipping it and glazing the other side. This should allow the sugar in the honey to harder a bit and give the chicken a crispy exterior. The risk to this is that if you overcook the glaze, it could burn. The other option would be to immediately mix your hot wings with the glaze when you take it out of the smoker so that it bonds to the chicken while the chicken is still warm. This will make a runnier, stickier chicken wings as the glaze will not have cooked with the chicken. This is ultimately how I did my wings that are shown in the picture.

Turmeric Rice w/ Dried Mango

This recipe came to me through a Wakanda cookbook with mild alterations. Because of what I had already learned about Egyptians eating grains and fruit, this seemed like the perfect side dish for the smoked wings. It came out super flavorful and was a pretty big hit.

Ingredients:

2 cups basmati or similar rice

1 tablespoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup of dried mango (chopped to bite size)

water

Directions:

1. Rinse the rice with a strainer and move to a large bowl. Submerge in water and let sit for 30 minutes.
2. Put 3 cups of water, the tumeric, and salt in pot and bring to a boil.
3. Drain the rice that had been soaking and add it to the boiling water.
4. Stir regularly until cooked al dente, which should take about 4 minutes.
5. Move the rice back to bowl and mix in the mango.
6. Now, you can just let it rest a half hour or so. The rice and dried mango should absorb any residual liquid. In the original recipe, they mentioned using coconut oil to oil the bottom of a pan and moving the rice to this pan to cook on low for an additional 45 minutes. This is supposed to give it a crispy edge. I actually tried this, but perhaps my stove was set too low, because it didn't work. Still, even without the crispy bits, it was very tasty. Even one guest who claimed to not like mango said he enjoyed it.

Lamb & Potatoes w/ Couscous

So my original plan for this mix was to use it as the filling for some fried samosas, which were also a recipe in my Wakanda cookbook. I could not get them to fry correctly though, so at the last minute I did a pivot and decided to make some couscous to serve with it instead. For the couscous, I used a garlic and parmesan box mix that I already on hand.

For the lamb, I didn't follow a recipe but was seasoning by taste. First, I chopped 24oz of tiny potatoes into smaller chunks. I heated some olive oil in a wok and added the potato chunks. I stirred while cooking and waited fore the potatoes to start to soften. Then I added 2 pounds of ground lamb and started to brown. As it was browning, I seasoned with garlic powder, onion powder, celery salt, cumin, and pepper. I also added some light brown sugar. When the lamb was just about finished cooking, I added some fresh chopped mint and lemon juice for acidity and freshness.

For the couscous box mix, I just followed the box instructions, but I found the flavor too mild, so I added extra garlic. The lamb mixture by itself was not that impressive, but with the couscous, I do feel like it came together as a complete dish.

Snacks & Games

During our afternoon break, we had both savory and sweet snacks including some delicious homemade hummus that was made by a friend, dried fruits, pita chips, and other similar things. Since I didn't want to jump straight to the next movie right away, we played a game. I bought this game specifically for this event, but I'm glad that I did. It was really fun.

The game was called Pitchstorm and it is an improv party game where your goal is to pitch a movie idea to an executive. The problem is that you did no prep work. You use cards to determine the main character of your story and the plot of the story. Then you have to sell the idea to the executive. The executive can then throw a wrench into your idea with a Note card than can make from small to major changes to the story. After everyone has pitched their movie, the executive chooses which one to produce. Then a new round begins with a new executive.

This game ended up being a lot of fun. I chose it because I felt that it fit our celebration of movies and our 100th movie night. The snacks were also a good touch. I'm glad I decided to do this because we definitely needed a break between films and this was a great way of doing that.

Authentic Indian Dinner

The film Temple Of Doom has a dinner scene which really casts Indian food in a bad light. For that reason, I wanted to go as authentic as possible with our Indian dinner. The problem is that I have never made Indian food before. Also, I knew that I would have to prep it during the second film, so I needed something that wouldn't take much work to make. That's when I happily discovered The Cumin Club. This company makes authentic Indian dishes in India and then freeze dries it and ships it out. These dishes have no perservatives or fillers. The ingredients on the bag read like a shopping list of authentic ingredients. To make these dishes, all you have to do is boil the appropriate amount of water, add the freeze dried food, stir, and follow the packages instructions on how to rest it. Whether covered or not for example.

This ended up being ideal for what I was doing, because it required so little work. I was able to make five different dishes on my stove top by making a couple at a time with different pots, moving the food to different dish, cleaning the pots and making the next dishes. Because I had a big group of people, I made two packs of each meal and four packs of rice. Each pack is supposed to make two servings, so I warned my guests to try a little bit of everything so there would be enough to go around.

Every single dish was delicious. I am not exaggerating. I have never been a big fan of the Indian restaurants in my area, so I wasn't sure what to expect with these dishes. They were so flavorful and reminded me of the homemade dishes an old neighbor of mine used to make.

My guests all enjoyed them as well. I was concerned that they wouldn't be able to handle the spice because many of my friends do not handle spice well. The spice in these dishes did not stop anyone from enjoying them. The friends that I was concerned about certainly felt the spice, but then they came back for more. The spiciest dish I bought had a spice level of 3 out of 5, but even that dish they kept coming back to. That was shocking to me and just shows how tasty all these dishes were.

Here's the dishes that we had that are featured in the picture above:

• On the left side of the plate is dal chawal, a lentil and rice dish which I put on some papad, which is a kind of crispy cracker
• The brown sauce at the top of my plate is paneer tikka, which is a tomato and onion curry with cheese. It was the spiciest of the dishes, but was loved by even friends who don't normally do spice.
• The yellow sauce below that is punjabi kadhi, which is made with spiced yogurt and gram flour.
• To the right of those sauces is aloo posto, which was the mildest spiced dish and was made with potatoes and poppy seeds.
• The brown sauce at the bottom is dal makhani, which is made with black lentils, tomatoes, and cream.
• All four of those sauces were served over tasty cumin rice. All of these dishes were also vegetarian.

I will definitely be ordering from The Cumin Club again, even if just for myself. If you are interested in ordering some for yourself, please use my referral link. You will save some money, and I will earn a credit on a future order.

After dinner, we watched our last movie and said our goodbyes. Overall, this was such a great event. I loved all of the food and the time spent with friends. This was a great way to celebrate the last 10 years. Here's to seeing what the next ten years will bring!