Hunger Games-ness

We went to see the film on Friday, and I was very pleased! I loved how Jennifer Lawrence brought Katniss to life, and all in all I thought it was really well done. Definitely read the book first, though. If you don't, it might be a little confusing, although there are several little tweaks in the movie designed to explain situations to those who haven't read the books.

Also entertaining: the horde of tweens behind us who were absolutely terrified at various points in the film. Come on. Why on earth would you go see a movie with a premise that revolves entirely around the horrors of violence and dystopian governmental brutality if you can barely handle the abomination that is Twilight? Frankly, I thought the movie could've done more with the violence. The entire point of the book is how horrible this all is, and how it needs to be overthrown. But they wanted to be able to show it to tweens, and I suppose I can see the financial reasons for that. Sigh. Damn you, tweens! Ruining movies for the rest of us since 1895.

I loved how they depicted the Capitol, with moving, blurred shots of the huge, ostentatiously colored crowds and all the noise. It was exactly how I'd imagine a frightening trip into that setting would feel like. Bravo, filmmakers. And I can totally empathize with Katniss' panicked feelings when going for her first interview. I can't even handle Sam's Club (like Costco, for those of you who don't know what it is). We went on Sunday and after a couple days of being at home isolated from noise and people except Patrick and the cats, I could not deal with the crowds. All that color, the words and advertisements everywhere, people babbling incessantly... We were standing in the checkout line and I started breathing heavily, heart pounding, and feeling freaked out, but I kept it together. Anxiety, I hate you so much.

Anyway, to get in the mood, on Thursday my sister and I created a meal from the book! We found the recipes here, at fictionalfood.net, and they were incredibly tasty. I'm definitely making them again. Here are the individual recipes we made:

• Mellark's Bakery Goat Cheese And Apple Tarts

• Chicken With Creamy Orange Sauce (from Katniss' lunch with Cinna)

We also have the recipe for Lamb Stew With Dried Plums, but we haven't made it yet. I hope it will also be delicious! Along with the tarts and chicken, we prepared some peas with pearl onions and attempted flower-shaped rolls. If you want to make this meal, you can go ahead and buy the peas and onions already together and frozen in a bag at your local supermarket. For the rolls, we tried cutting flowers out of Pillsbury crescent roll dough. We didn't have a cookie cutter, so it didn't work very well, but we tried. They were good regardless of the weird shapes.

For the chicken recipe, I recommend using 3 breasts instead of 2, 2 oranges instead of 1, and definitely add the chives (marked as optional in the recipe). You'll have quite a bit of sauce unless you reduce it a lot longer than we did, and the extra goodies help. The chives really make this dish. They compliment the sweetness of the oranges perfectly. We served this on jasmine rice, and it was just lovely. The tarts are to die for.

Saturday we capped the Hunger Games experience off by shooting arrows! It's going to take a long while to achieve proficiency with a bow, but anything worth doing takes time to learn. It was great fun. I wore my massive leather arm protection getup, and didn't get string-slapped even once, so maybe just knowing that the leather is on my arm is enough to make me do it right? I don't know, but hooray for no pain!

I aim to shoot a lot more arrows this summer, and hopefully improve quite a bit.

...see what I did there?