Wild Hunger Can't Be Broken (#117)

 

August's film this year was Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, a Disney film about a girl who becomes a horse diver. The story revolves around fairs, so I decided that would be the inspiration for our meal.

I had never seen this film, but I discovered in my research that there is a scene where the lead meets a boy at the fair who is cooking hotdogs rotisserie style, by skewering them onto a makeshift bicycle wheel. This was the launching point for my dinner concept.

Carnival Dogs

We have done hotdogs at other movie nights and I didn't want to be too repetitive, so I decided to give the hotdogs a creative spin that embraced the spirit of the fair.

Hotdogs can be cooked many different ways. In the film, he is cooking them rotisserie style on skewers. I don't have the means to do that, but I thought that I might be able to do something similar. My oven has a fan in it that is used for convection baking and air fry baking to circulate air. I came up with the idea of skewering hotdogs and resting them over a baking pan to allow room for airflow. This would be the closest thing that I could do to rotisserie.

Then, I decided to do something a little bit extra. I decided to cut the hotdogs in a spiral around their skewers and pull them out like accordions before cooking. This gave the hotdogs a fun and unique look, but also cooked them really well and really evenly.

In my oven, I baked them on the air fry setting at 375°F for 9 minutes. This made the skin crispy and red but also cooked the inside well. This might be my new favorite hotdog. The flavor was good, the cook was even, and the hotdogs were not greasy at all as any grease was dripping into the pan below them.

To stay with the carnival/fair feel, I didn't want typical hotdog buns. I found some pretzel buns at Walmart. To go with the hotdogs, we had chili and mustard, and shoestring fries that I also cooked in the air fryer.

For dessert, I couldn't find any references while researching this film. Now that I've seen it, I can tell you that there is a scene where the protagonist is eating cotton candy. Funny enough, I own a cotton candy machine and thought about using it for dessert, but ultimately, I decided on caramel apples instead.

Caramel Apples

I chose caramel apples because of their connection to fair foods and also because we had never done them before. As an extra bonus, apples are considered a favorite food for horses, so it fit that aspect of the film as well.

I used Honeycrisp apples for this. Wash and scrub your apples well before coating or the caramel won't stick to their waxy exterior. I made homemade caramel sauce using the recipe below.

Ingredients:

• 1 stick (8 tbsp) butter
• 2 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

1. On a low heat, melt butter in a pot. Let the butter start to brown before the next step.
2. Stir in condensed milk, brown sugar, corn syrup, and salt.
3. Raise the heat gradually and stir constantly with a wooden spatula to avoid sugar burning on the bottom. The goal is to reach 237°F on a candy thermometer.
4. Once temperature has been reached, remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Once the caramel has started to cool, you can dip apples in it. Be sure to spear them first with popsicle sticks. I set up a topping station for our caramel apples with things like milk or white chocolate chips, mini marshmallows, sprinkles, and pretzels.

Overall, they worked well. Caramel apples on sticks are challenging to eat but they tasted good and fit the theme well.

Overall, the night was successful. The only thing I would change is that the pretzel buns fell apart from the chili. I should have toasted them first. Other than that, the food was great and everything tied in well with the movie.