Dinner and a Movie

I was surprised that I liked "A Beautiful Mind" as much as I did. I guess I'm starting to think Russell Crowe can act. The movie was way too slow, but I liked the story and found myself sobbing heavily at the end.

And here's what we ate:

Crisp Chicken-Fried Steak Strips

1 lb flank steak
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon red-wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon minced garlic
3 cups panko
5 large eggs, lightly beaten
About 2 cups vegetable oil for frying

Dipping Sauce:
1/4 cup coarse-grain or whole-grain mustard
1/2 cup mayonnaise

Cut steak across the grain into 1/2-inch-wide strips.

Stir together soy sauce, lemon juice, sesame oil, vinegar, pepper, cayenne, and garlic. Add flank steak and marinate 10 minutes.

While steak marinates, prepare the dipping sauce by whisking together mustard and mayonnaise in a small bowl and transfer to a small serving dish.

Spread panko in a shallow pan. Dredge each strip of steak in panko, then dip in beaten egg, letting excess drip off, and dredge again in panko, shaking off excess. Arrange steak as breaded in 1 layer on a large plate.

Heat 1/4 inch oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then fry 5 or 6 strips (they should sizzle), turning over once, until golden brown, 5 to 7 minutes total.

Drain on paper towels. Fry remaining strips in same manner, reheating oil between batches.

Serve steak strips with mustard sauce for dipping.

Oh me, oh my, but this was yummy! I don't care for mustard, so I didn't have the dipping sauce; Andy put the steak, dipping sauce, and salad into tortillas and ate 'em that way. Yummyocious.

Comments

[Steve]

Oh, great...another recipe for something that promises to be both tasty and fattening. Thanks a lot.

I enjoyed "A Beautiful Mind" both in book and in movie form. I saw the movie first and thought Ron Howard's technique of showing Nash's delusions as "real" characters was an effective way of showing how these hallucinatory visions appeared to Nash. This was done with a lot of subtlety. Notice how Nash's delusional characters always announced their presence with sound - you would always hear them before you saw them. Supposedly this is because there is a pronounced auditory component to most hallucinations.

I also liked the movie because some of it takes place at Princeton and was filmed on location. It was fun to see the old, familiar places. "Hey, I used to live in that!"

The book, as you'd expect, has a lot of detail that was left out of the movie because it did not advance the main storyline. For example, Nash had an earlier relationship with another woman with whom he had a son. He and Alicia were divorced and ended up remarrying each other in the late 1990's. And Nash really was a bull-goose loony. (One of my classmates, a physics major, used to see him wandering around Fine Hall late at night, where he would leave incomprehensible messages on the blackboards.)

Anyway, read the book...a fascinating story of a most unusual man.

I'm taking a game theory course, taught by Nash and other Princeton faculty, on CD-ROM. One of the benefits of being an alumnus, I guess. You can visit Nash's website, too: www.math.princeton.edu/jfnj