Cream Puffs and Hobbits

Today, my mother (the estimable Robin Winter) decided to teach me how to make cream puffs. Unfortunately, no photographs remain of this endeavor  as we were much too preoccupied with chucking the flour into the boiling water and butter and stirring it madly to take pictures. 

The first batch turned out terribly. Due to my father's long running battle against cholesterol, we have used a sort of egg that consists only of egg whites in a box, and this and the dough for cream puffs do not coexist. As a result, we wound up with flat cream puffs the first time around and had to run down to the corner store (a rather funky little place full of foods labeled in Cyrillic and German) and get a dozen eggs.

These did the trick, and we've now got a whole bunch of cream puffs, though three fewer than we made. The first two of these we ate. The third...

"He did it!"

Yeah, we should have learned not to do that by now. 

And while we were doing this, we were watching The Hobbit. Now, I'd seen it in theaters  but my mother hadn't, so I fear her recollection of the film will be broken up by timings for cream puffs (Wargs! "oh wait no time to turn the oven down to 350!") It's a lot of fun, but I have rather mixed feelings about it. 

As a Lord of the Rings fan since about the age of ten, I'm very fond of all the books and the appendices, and oh boy did the writers do their research. It's lovely to be so immersed in that world. But...well, I don't like cliffhanging scenes and sometimes it seems that practicality was sacrificed for the sake of the Wow-Factor--some of the action scenes grew tedious because it was all about people swinging on bridges and falling improbable distances. My impulse with those was to sit there and look at the shiny world that'd been created and wait for the plot to reappear. 

As per my earlier remark, the bad parts outweigh the good, and I'll happily line up for the next premier anyway. But there were a few points where the baking was a nice break from the movie!