The Academy Awards are just around the corner – March 4, to be exact – and things are starting to get cooking (literally).
Red River Theatres has been showing current Oscar-nominated films for the past several weeks, and will continue to do so through the awards. To pair with the films – and other famous Oscar winners of the past – Local Baskit, the meal kit business located in the Concord Center on North Main Street, has put together some meal ideas to pair with certain movies.
“A few weeks ago when the Oscar nominees were announced, we put up a whole week of meals for subscribers,” said Local Baskit owner Beth Richards. “We got creative and tied them to a best-picture nominee.”
The idea is to eat a healthy, tasty meal that has something to do with a big movie while you watch said movie, For example, she said, a Philly cheesesteak was offered as a pairing to Rocky.
Local Baskit will offer these movie-paired dinners up through the awards show. They will be available as “Cook Tonight” meals, which are meal kits that anybody, not just subscribers, can pick up. This makes things easy – just go to localbaskit.com, click Cook Tonight and see what you like, then go buy it.
We were lucky enough to try one of the meals ourselves last week.
Richards sent us a list of some options via email, and we were intrigued by one option that we couldn’t pronounce: Salmon en Papillote.
The dish features salmon – that’s the part of the name we did recognize – with lime zest topping, a shallot-based sauce, steamed broccoli and white rice.
This meal pairs with The Shape of Water, the leader of the current field of Oscar nominees with 13 nods, including one for best picture. That movie, as you’ll recall from our review a few weeks ago, focuses on a woman’s love affair with a water-dwelling monster-like creature. The movie also has an inescapable hue of green that appears both in items on the screen as well as the overall tint of the picture – the film is very green.
That’s why it pairs perfectly with the Salmon en Papillote, a dish whose main protein comes from the water and which is adorned adequately with green things.
And since we did see the movie, this was the ideal meal for us to try.
Following the clear and well-illustrated instructions included in the kit, we boiled the water for the rice, diced the shallots for the sauce, minced ginger and sliced lime zest to top the fish and unfolded the parchment paper. The paper is the key to this whole recipe.
Soon the rice was dropped into the water and the broccoli was put in a steamer basket. While that was going, we put each slice of salmon (we got a meal for two, but you can also get meals for four) in the middle of the parchment paper, then added the ginger, lime zest and a couple thin lime slices on top before wrapping the paper around it all in a nice package.
Into the oven at 400 degrees it went. Ten minutes later, it was done.
While that cooked, we mixed the provided Worcestershire sauce and rice vinegar with the chopped shallots and boiled that for a few minutes before turning off the burner and adding a tablespoon of butter to the mix.
Once the fish came out, we unwrapped it and added the sauce, then plated the broccoli and rice.
It was one of the fresher, tastier meals we’d had in a while, and though we were glad it was real fish and not meat from an amphibious man-beast, we enjoyed the connection to the movie, even if we couldn’t watch it while eating the dinner.
As far as some other options, there will be a Fish ‘n’ Chips for The King’s Speech, Gluten-Free General Tso’s Chicken for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Moroccan-Spiced Pizza for Casablanca and Shrimp Enchiladas with Jalapeno Cream Sauce for Forrest Gump. We like the sound of all of them.
Go to localbaskit.com or call 219-0882.
