Last night I had the best of intentions to go out to one or more Halloween parties. However, it was a long week, and so I went home and slept instead. To make up for it, tonight I did what all the cool Mission-dwellers do on a Saturday night:

I baked Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s Sausage, Leek and Apple Pie and watched the Alex Cox Revengers Tragedy. Then I followed it up by cleaning my kitchen.

Notes:

I used one of the fancy vegetarian ground soy substances instead of sausage, but it was still a bit meaty for my taste–anything with ground stuff in tends to raise my hackles even if I’ve put the soy substance in myself. It was still tasty though. Tomorrow I will try the leftovers on meat-eaters and see what their reaction to the ground soy stuff is.

Following Theresa’s proportions, I wound up with enough filling for two pies. Maybe her 9-inch pie was a lot deeper than mine–I wound up purchasing a pre-made piecrust, and it was definitely on the shallow side, but very tasty–I will definitely buy the brand again the next time I make pie. I’ll have to be careful to remove the top crust from its pan before it thaws–I wound up with a glop of crust on the top of my pie since I have neither a rolling pin nor a good rolling surface. I also have a couple of pie shell recipes I want to try out soon, so I may have to bring my pie-cooking to another household the next time.

If you have whole pepper and no pepper grinder, a coffee grinder works admirably for the task. (We shall see if I cleaned it out well enough that my next cup of coffee doesn’t taste peppery.)

I made the following substitutions:

For the full celery-root, half a celery root and half a turnip. I think that next time I do this, I’ll leave out the Smart Ground and just do a general sliced root vegetable pie, with parsnips and beets added for good measure. This was the first time I’d cooked with celery root, and it was really yummy–it will defintely make it into my future root vegetable creations.

For the saffron, I asafoetida, with a bit of curry thrown in for good measure. It still wasn’t quite as flavorful as I would have liked–I ended up sprinkling more curry on top of my pie before I ate it. Mmmm, curry. (It has become obvious that I can’t cook English food without adding a lot of curry to it. Clearly India was the best thing that ever happened to the British Empire. The sun still hasn’t set on India.)

I also picked up a sharp cheddar cheese, which I totally forgot about when I was done baking the pie. I think I’ll try some of that with the pie tomorrow.

The Cox Revengers Tragedy is excellent. Fantastic, even. I would definitely recomend it to anyone who likes either the post-apocalyptic or the Jacobean, as it does both well at once. Chris Eccleston was costumed weirdly like his incarnation of the Doctor as Vindici, which was a bit distracting, but I can sort of imagine Nine running around killing people and being a ventriloquist with skulls so it was totally ok?

It also had Eddie Izzard as Lussurioso and Derek Jacobi as the Duke, and a soundtrack by Chumba Wumba, and basically the fact that it actually got made is kind of a mystery to me. But the best kind of mystery, where the universe hands you a really excellent film to watch. PS Alex Cox also directed Repo Man, which makes it ::even more mysterious::.

The special features were also a welcome surprise, primarily watching Eddie Izzard explain earnestly that the period of drama should have been called “Jamesian” and not “Jacobian.” And learning that the producer (Tod Davies) was Marjorie’s mannerisms doppelgänger! (Really Marjorie, you are required to see it all for the 5 seconds in which she describes Eccleston as “intense,” and then waves her hands, makes big eyes, and follows it up with  “like that.”)