What's the best time you ever had at the movies?

I have been dying to go to the movies lately.

Specifically, I’ve been dying to see the reboot of The Naked Gun, given the effusive praise that’s followed its release from people who I trust unreservedly on such matters. Our usual babysitters have been tied up with back-to-school-and-or-college obligations, and so I haven’t been able to go yet. I think we’re finally going to make it tonight, but the wait has been killing me.

In the meantime, it got me thinking.

What’s the best time you’ve ever had at the movies?

Theaters went through a pronounced (if understandable) downturn in the few years after COVID started, and many studios started releasing movies to streaming services much earlier than they would have before. For someone who can struggle to make it out to a theater (see above), that was a blessing—but there’s no denying that seeing a movie in the theater is a different experience. You get a bigger picture and better sound, of course, but there’s also the thrill of experiencing it with other people, sharing in laughter or cheers or screams or throwing of popcorn.

(I am glad that I took my children to see The Minecraft Movie before the “chicken jockey” thing went viral a few days later.)

I’ve seen some great movies in the theater, though this question isn’t about what the best movies you’ve seen are—it’s a question of the experience.

Here’s my list:

The Hangover / Borat

These screwball comedies fall into the same bucket, so I’ll lump them together. Are these “great” movies? No. Have they aged flawlessly? Almost certainly not. Seeing some of those gags for the first time in a packed theater of people also seeing them for the first time, though, well—I distinctly recall leaving The Hangover with my cheeks sore from laughing, and I’ve never heard a crowd-pop like the naked brawl in Borat.

The Dark Knight

I haven’t been as big as some people on comic-book movies, though the clips of crowd reactions to (spoiler, I guess?) Captain America picking up the hammer in Avengers: Endgame illustrate what I’m going for quite well here. For me, the peak of superhero movies remains the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, and seeing this immensely-hyped installation on opening night was electric. When the truck flipped on LaSalle Avenue, the crowd broke out in applause. Great times.

Snakes on a Plane

We all knew what we were getting into, and the movie happily delivered exactly what we came for. I have never seen it outside the theater and have absolutely no need or desire to do so.

Notorious

I don’t mean the Hitchcock classic, I mean the 2009 biopic of the Notorious BIG. I saw it on opening night at the Times Square AMC and the crowd sang along with every song. I don’t remember if the movie was any good or not, but the experience was spectacular.

The Great Gatsby

Just as the movie started, my wife accidentally shot a champagne cork across the theater. The people sitting in front of us turned and glared, to which she asked—quite fairly—“I’m sorry, what movie are you here to see?”

It’s Baz Luhrmann, people. You didn’t miss anything.

What’s yours?

While you mull that over, I’ve got a loaded slate of ACBN-Certified Good Things for your weekend ahead, including:

• My annual homage to the cuisine of the State Fair
• Two cocktails, including one you probably can’t make
• Some ska-adjacent music
• A really dumb book (complimentary)
• Pets, and more!

[Nicole Kidman voice] Fridays feel good in a place like this.

Be the State Fair you wish to see in the world

It’s mid-August, and that means we’ve entered one of my favorite food seasons: State Fair Season.

As I wrote last year:

We need the state fair, if for no other reason than that August is a month in desperate need of a holiday—a weird, restless spot on the calendar when summer has started to rot but the cooling breeze of fall still seems far away. Despite my many impassioned letters, the federal government has shown no interest in declaring an August holiday for “resting from our agonies”.

Into this void, individual states come bearing comfort and mercy.

This comfort arrives in the form of massive agricultural expos-turned-carnivals: gleeful mishmashes of amusement-park rides, animal husbandry, where-are-they-now live music performances, and—of greatest importance to me—absolutely deranged food. Just as August starts to curdle, reports start rolling in from Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and beyond of culinary delights beyond one’s wildest imagination—or perhaps within one’s imagination so long as you imagine that any and every food can and should be deep-fried prior to consumption.

Every year here at the ACBN, I pay homage to the state fair through my own boneheaded-but-delicious culinary flights of fancy, with previous efforts including a Chile Relleno Corn Dog, Flamin’ Hot Cheese Curds, a Peanut Butter-Chocolate Pulled Pork Waffle, the Kentuckiana Hot Loin on a Stick, and the River Cities on a Stick.

Well, it’s time to head back to the lab again.

This year, I let my inspiration come from practical matters. I had a few pounds of pulled pork left in the freezer from the 4th of July, and I had a strong desire to not deep-fry something as I had in previous years. Instead, I’d go Scandinavian—sort of.

Though I don’t have any Nordic heritage myself, I’ve long been a fan of aebelskiver, a Danish filled pancake made with a fluffy, egg-rich dough cooked in a special pan with semi-spherical divots in it.

Usually, they’re sweet, filled with apples or jam and topped with sugar. My plan was to flip that formula to the savory side, adding corn and seasoning to the batter and filling the balls with pulled pork, caramelized onion cheddar cheese, green onions and chives. I call them ‘Cue Balls.

‘Cue Balls

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup corn flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 4 tablespoons melted butter
• 4 egg yolks
• 4 egg whites
• Chives
• about 8 ounces pulled pork
• about 4 ounces caramelized onion cheddar, shredded (I used Trader Joe’s version)
• a good handful of chopped scallions
• Ghee (or butter)
• Hot sauce or barbecue sauce

Mix the flour, corn flour, sugar, baking powder, onion powder and salt in a bowl. In a separate, larger bowl, mix the buttermilk, melted butter, and egg yolks, then add in the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Take the separate egg whites and whisk with a stand mixer (or by hand, if you’re strong) until stiff peaks form, then fold this into the batter.

In another bowl—yeah, this is a “get everything dirty” recipe—mix slightly-warmed pulled pork with shredded cheddar, chopped scallions, and chives.

Brush the wells of an aebelskiver pan with ghee or butter, then set over medium-high heat. Fill each well about 3/4 of the way with batter, and after about 30 seconds tuck a tablespoon or so of the pork mixture in, pushing down slightly. Top with another dab of batter and cook until mostly-set on the bottom, flipping gently with a spoon to cook the other side.

I won’t lie to you; I’ve been making the normal versions of these for years and I still botch the first batch every time. After some trial and error, though, they eventually come out great, and the savory version was no exception. I topped them with more chives and a hearty drizzle of Humble House Ancho & Morita hot sauce:

Let’s see a cross-section:

So, yeah. These were dumb, but they were also darn tasty—the batter stayed fluffy, while the pork-and-cheese mixture got nice and melty inside. It’s an effort worthy of the midway, and a good reason to buy yourself a new and mostly-unnecessary kitchen gadget.

Alternate Name: the Unobtanium Martini

I cannot explain to you how excited I have been about a random seasonal soda flavor.

Ale-8-One has long been beloved in Kentucky; the citrus-ginger soda’s been made in Winchester, Kentucky for more than a century, with its distribution mostly limited to the Bluegrass State and a few surrounding areas. In the past decade, the company has introduced a rotating cast of seasonal-variant flavors, including Orange Cream, Blackberry, Peach and StrawMelon. Their latest, however, has hit the local markets like a bomb—Paw Paw Ale-8-One.

If you’re not familiar with paw paws, they’re a tree that grows widely in the eastern half of North America, and their custardy fruit is often described as something between mango and banana. It’s often called North America’s tropical fruit, but it has a very short shelf life and doesn’t travel well, so it’s rarely (if ever) seen in stores.

Well, the mad scientists at Ale-8-One and Kentucky State University teamed up to put that flavor into a soda and—after visiting a few local Krogers to hunt it down—I can report that it’s really freaking good. It’s very sweet, but surprisingly delicate and nuanced, and I immediately went back to stock up on more.

Now, I’m raving about this even though I know full well that most of you don’t live in Kentucky and probably won’t be able to procure any for yourself. That’s a shame, and I’m sorry for your loss. I’m still going to make a cocktail with it, and—liberated by the knowledge of this inaccessibility—I’m going to pair it with a similarly-inaccessible ingredient, the increasingly-impossible-to-find green Chartreuse. This isn’t a totally off-base pairing; the Chartreuse Swizzle is a well-known and beloved cocktail, a mixture of Chartreuse, falernum, pineapple juice and lime. I’d simply swap out the pineapple for the paw paw soda.

It’s Kentucky Tiki, and it’s a drink that you can basically only make if you live in Kentucky but recently went to Paris. (Hey, that’s me!)

The Paw Paw Swizzle

• 1-1/2 ounces Green Chartreuse
• 1/2 ounce John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum
• 3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
• 4-6 ounces Ale-8-One Paw Paw soda

Combine all the ingredients in a tall glass, and fill with crushed ice. Stir with a long spoon, then top off again with soda. Garnish with a lime wedge and a tiny cocktail umbrella and consume, feeling the natural connection between French Carthusian monks and Kentucky fruit foragers.

This was, I once again regret to inform you, really quite good. I’m not sure how you can make it without just stopping by my house, but hey—I’ve got more of both. Stop on by.

(Just, uh, call in advance.)

The taxi’s waitin’, he’s blowin’ his horn

It feels unfair to share only a drink you can’t make, so I’m going to offer a second one, one whose only limitation is the sheer volume of ingredients involved.