Broth With Batman (#102)
May's film was 1989's Batman by Tim Burton. In this film, there is dinner scene where Bruce Wayne is on a date and they eat soup. The type of soup that they are eating is unclear, but while researching for this film, I discovered that the pairing of Batman and soup is extremely common. Several movies have scenes of Bruce Wayne eating soup and apparently that carries over to the comics as well.
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It didn't take me long to uncover that according to the comics, Batman's favorite meal was a dish called mulligatawny soup. This inspired our dinner theme. I decided that rather than focusing on just one soup, we would do something like a soup bar where guests could taste and sample multiple different soup dishes. I would make a couple to get started and encouraged guests to bring their own soups to add to the lineup.
Since dinner was based on Batman, I decided that Joker would help inspire dessert. I struggled with figuring out the best way to do this. There is brief scene in the film where Joker kills someone and their face falls into a three layer chocolate cake, but it's a super small scene where if you blink, you could miss it. Ultimately what I realized is that in this film, Joker follows a lot of clown stereotypes. Even though it's not in the movie, the dessert that I associate with clowns is pies. So I decided to make a Joker themed pie.
Below is more information on the soups and pie the recipes for how I made them.
Mulligatawny Soup
The first dish I wanted to feature was mulligatawny soup. It's an English dish that dates back to the British colonization of India. Apparently, it was common dish amongst the British soldiers that started as not much more than a broth, leading to name which translates as "pepper water." Over time, more ingredients were added to it to make it more compatible with the English palate. To this day, there are a lot of variations on this dish. After looking through several different recipes, I saw the different things that a lot of them seemed to have in common and decided that I liked this one best. I did make changes to it though.
Below is the recipe for what I ended up making. This makes a lot. If you have a small group, I would cut the portions in half. With that said, this makes very tasty leftovers, so you might want to make more than you need.
If you make a party size portion of this, you will need a deep pot or pan. I used a 7qt saute pan and that worked really well. You could use a deep pot as well. This is essentially a one pot dish where we will sauté our main ingredients before adding broth and other ingredients.- Melt butter on low in your deep pot or pan. If you haven't chopped your veggies and chicken yet, now would be a good time to do it. Don't let the butter burn.
- Add the chopped veggies and chicken, increase to a medium heat and begin to sauté in the butter. Exact measurements on the vegetables aren't important. I like to have approximately equal parts celery, onion, and carrots. All together, the amount of veggies that I use is close to the amount of chicken, which gives it a good balance while remaining chicken forward.
- Once the onion and celery starts to soften, stir in the four and curry. Stir regularly until all the veggies are cooked and the curry color is uniform. In total, this will probably be about 10 minutes of cooking time for the vegetables. The chicken doesn't need to be fully cooked yet.
- Add chick broth, bring to boil, and reduce temp to a simmer. Let simmer for 20 to 30 minutes. This would be a good time to clean your rice and prep your apple. I clean my dry basmati rice by pouring it into a separate bowl, submerging it in water, and giving it a stir. It doesn't need to soak. When you stir the rice in the water, you'll notice the water get cloudy. That's why we wash. Next put the rice and water in a strainer and rinse under the tap. Repeat if needed until the water passing through the rice is clear. For the apple, you do not need to peel it, but you do need to core it. After that, I would suggest cutting the apple in half longways and then slicing each half to thin apple slices. Next, I like to chop each slice into thirds to make nice thin bite-size pieces.
- After the broth has simmered for awhile, add the apple, rice, and thyme to the dish. Stir. Add salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for additional 20 minutes to give the rice time to cook. This is a good time to start warming your heavy cream.
- Pour heavy cream in a separate small pot and set on low heat. Stir occasionally.
- After the rice has finished cooking, reduce temp of soup to low and slowly stir in cream about a tablespoon at a time. Dairy can curdle if you quickly add it to a hot dish, so warming it first and adding only a little at a time helps prevent this from happening. The dairy will thicken the soup and add great flavor. At this point, you are done.
This dish came out really, really good. You can leave it on low heat while you serve or turn the heat off. This dish is typically served warm, but if you let it cool, it will thicken more and will still have all of its great flavor. It makes great leftovers.
Cold Vichyssoise
For my second soup, I decided to go with vichyssoise. This soup is featured in Batman Returns, which is the sequel to this film. Since we don't typically do sequels on movie night, I knew that we would be skipping this film. With that said, it's the same actor and director, so I felt that it made sense to incorporate that dish into this viewing.
Another option for my second soup was French onion soup, which is Batman's favorite dish in the animated series. Ultimately, I decided on vichyssoise because it is served cold, which meant that I would be able to make the night before and I wouldn't be cooking too dishes at the same time.
I've never made vichyssoise before so I did some research, watched some videos, reviewed some recipes. This one was my favorite and I followed it pretty closely, with only a few small changes. I also doubled it to make a larger portion. Here's the full recipe for what I did.
- The first step is going to be to chop and clean your leeks. For this recipe, we will just be using the white bulbs, so cut the bulb off each leak just before it starts to green. Then cut each bulb in half long ways. Next, chop each half stalk into multiple bite size chunks. Move all these small pieces into a large bowl and submerge in water. Stir it all up in the bowl. Leek bulbs are full of sand and dirt. By doing this, the dirt should fall out of the leeks and sink to the bottom of the bowl while the leek pieces float. Let them sit in the water for a little while while you continue.
- Melt and brown butter in a pot on medium-low heat. This can take several minutes. Don't burn the butter.
- Strain your leek pieces and run under water to ensure they are clean. Add them to the pot and sauté in the butter until wilted.
- Add potatoes, chicken stock, and salt. If you want to keep this vegetarian, you can use a vegetable stock instead. Bring to boil and simmer at least 30 minutes until potatoes are soft.
- Turn off heat and start blending. You can do this with an immersion blender or regular blender. If you are using a regular blender, make sure that it is designed to work with hot or warm liquids. If not, you will want to wait until it cools more. Only fill your blender half way each time to avoid making a mess.
- Once blended, use a fine mesh strainer to strain your soup as you move it to a separate large air-tight container with lid. Anything that doesn't go through the strainer should be blended again. A smooth texture is important to making a quality vichyssoise.
- Close the lid and let sit until room temperature. You could also move it to the refrigerator and finish this before serving. At this point you should have a very tasty purée. The leeks have an onion flavor, so this will taste like a buttery leek and potato purée. You could stop here and have a very tasty dish. Next we will be adding cream, which will make the dish creamier, but some of the rich buttery flavor will be lost.
- If you refrigerated the dish, take it out a half hour to an hour before serving. You want the dish to be close to room temperature. The last thing to do before serving is to stir in the heavy cream and white pepper until fully combined.
- Serve with chopped green onions to garnish. Guests can also sprinkle a little nutmeg over it if they choose for extra flavor.
This dish came out very tasty. I was a little disappointed after adding the cream, because I feel like the cream mellowed out some of its rich buttery and salty flavors. It was still pretty good though. I have never had good luck with French dishes, so I was happy that this one came out as intended.
Joker Themed Pie
My primary goal for this pie was to make something that just screamed Joker. I immediately decided that I wanted it to be green and purple to fit the classic Joker color scheme. How that was going to work was more challenging. When I think green pie, my brain goes to key lime. I don't have access to key lime, but I decided regular limes would be comparable. Next I had to think of something purplish that could go with lime. I decided that I could probably make something with raspberry that would be pretty close to right color. I also decided that the sweetness of the raspberry would probably pair well with the lime and would offer a counter to the tartness of that dish.
I have never had good luck making graham cracker crust, but my grocer store sells some pre-made pie crusts, and those have always worked well for me, so that's what I used here. Also, I originally planned on using fresh limes to juice and to zest the limes to add more flavor and color to the pie. It turns out each lime didn't hold a lot of juice and they were pain to zest, so ultimately I ended up just buying lime juice and using food coloring for the color. Below is what I ended up doing.
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 325°F
- Combine lime juice, condensed milk, and egg yolks in a large bowl.
- Once evenly mixed, it will be a yellowish color. Add a couple drops of blue food coloring and stir until the yellow changes to a pale green. Once green, start using the green food coloring. Add and stir a little at a time until you have a more vibrant green color throughout the mixture.
- Pour into graham cracker crusted pie tray. Don't over fill the pie as we will be adding a topping later.
- Put pie in oven until set, which should be about 15 minutes.
- While the pie is cooking, you can start working on the raspberry topping. I made this very similarly to how I made the red pudding for "The Thing". Put fruit, water, sugar, and rum in a small pot and bring to a boil.
- Stir fruit mix regularly. As the fruit softens, mash it into the juice to get all the flavor out of the fruit before we strain it out.
- Your pie will probably finish during this. You'll know it's set if it jiggles when moved. Remove from the oven and let cool while you finish the fruit topping.
- Once all the fruit has been thoroughly cooked and mashed, remove from hear. Use a fine mesh strainer to strain the juice into a separate bowl. The leftover fruit mash can be a tasty snack on its own but will no longer be a part of this recipe.
- Carefully add cornstarch to warm juice, stirring in a little at a time to avoid clumping. Move the juice back to a pot and bring to a simmer.
- Stir regularly as the juice begins to thicken. At this point, I moved the juice to a squeeze bottle and let it cool more.
- Once the fruit topping is about room temperature, decorate the pie. I made a spiral. Another option would be to make creepy smiley face.
- Refrigerate pie and whatever is left in the squeeze bottle.
Overall, this was a great event. Along with the soups, I had a selection of crackers, rolls, and some white bread. I had some regular butter out, but I also made a simple whipped butter. If you have made any of my ice cream recipes, you will remember my warning that when you whip heavy cream you want to use a chilled bowl otherwise you will make butter. That's what I did here. I had used 3 cups of heavy cream when I made the two soups so I took the last cup (heavy cream is sold in a quart) and whipped it with the whisk attachment on my mixer. All I had to add was some salt. It was tasty and easier to spread the traditional butter.
I had planned a game for the night, but we ended up not doing it. The movie was long and we were all enjoying each other's company so it didn't seem necessary. If we had done it, it would have been a try-not-to-laugh style game that I was planning to call Batman vs Joker. People would go head to head where one would play the Joker and try to make the other person laugh. The other person would play Batman and would have to try to keep a straight face. If they laugh or even smile, then the loose. The punishment for losing is cream pie to the face. Cream pies in this case are just whipped cream in a pie tin.
Then, they would switch roles and the old Batman would be the new Joker. After everyone played both roles, if anyone survived without being pied, they would move onto the next round and go head to head. The goal would be to find the best Batman (who doesn't break) and the best Joker (who caused the most people to break).
We didn't get to this game, but if we had had more time, I was prepared to do so. I don't regret skipping the game as it really didn't feel necessary. The was no dead time when it would have been helpful. The movie was long but delightful and the dinner was delicious. Overall, the night was a great success.
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