Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/trying-out-a-new-recipe-justine-dorions-sticky-ginger-bars/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58761

When I opened Instagram yesterday, the first video to come up was from one of my favorite food content creators, Justine Dorion (perhaps better known as @justine_snacks). You may remember back in 2022 when I made her Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. Well, this time, she was making Sticky Ginger Bars, and I knew immediately that I was going to make them right then and there.

Wouldn’t you know it, though, I was lacking heavy cream and dates! Funny enough, I usually have both, but just happened to be out in this instance. So I grabbed them at the store and then made these bars right then and there.

So let’s talk about it!

First, the ingredients. We’ve got the basics: flour, sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, the usual suspects. Some of the more “oh I don’t have that in my pantry currently” type items are pecans, dates, and fresh ginger. At least those are pretty easily acquirable! Overall, I thought the ingredients were very normal things, and not overly expensive. Dates are definitely pricey (and so is my one true butter, Kerrygold) but otherwise it seems like a pretty standard, easy list of ingredients.

The first thing I made was the ginger cookie dough. I loved that in the steps of her recipe, she lists the measurements for the ingredient you’re using in that step. IT WAS SO HELPFUL. Thank you, Justine, for thinking of those of us who are tired of scrolling back up to the ingredients list to see the measurement again. Bless.

Mixing everything for the dough together was super easy, I just threw everything in my stand mixer and let it go until it was lighter in color like the recipe says. The real struggle came in trying to press the dough into a parchment lined baking dish.

In Justine’s photo on her blog, the dough looks so much more cooperative and less anger-inducingly sticky. Here’s how mine looked after I about had a meltdown about not being able to spread it evenly and get it into the corners well:

The dough, though very spiced and tasty, was difficult to work with and didn’t want to spread nicely. It just wanted to stick to itself and the rubber spatula. But I finally got it in there well enough that I moved onto the caramel.

I don’t like making caramel, I find it to a trifling process. I will say for this caramel, it was about as easy as a caramel can be. Butter and sugar (and in this case, honey!) and you melt it together until it boils and then once you take it off the heat after a few minutes you just add your dates and pecans and heavy cream and there you go. Not so bad! It really took no time at all to make the caramel, the thing that took forever was chopping the dates. Partially because I bought pitted and had to pit each one before chopping them.

After mixing up the caramel, here’s what it looked like:

I burned myself very slightly eating more of this than would be considered just a taste test. It was so flippin’ good. Once I poured it on top of the cookie dough and put it in the oven, I licked that spatula spotless. Delish.

The recipe says to bake them for 25-30 minutes, so I just did 25 and hoped they weren’t underdone. It came out looking like this (I sprinkled flaky sea salt on before the photo):

Well, it’s certainly something. Mostly pecans, from the looks of it. It didn’t look all that glamorous, and I had to stop myself from being impatient and trying to cut into it while it was warm. It was pretty much straight goop. Not soupy, but definitely not solid, either. I was nervous I had messed up, or not baked it long enough. I started to get anxious that I’d wasted all that time and ingredients.

Turns out, it just needed to cool (like the recipe says)!

Okay that looks really yummy. And… it is! Molasses, pecans, vanilla, fresh ginger, what’s not to love? These bad boys are packed full of spicy goodness (not spicy like hot, spicy like warm Christmas-y spices) and they are sticky sweet ooey-gooey goodness that needs washed down with a swig of milk. They are a lot but they are quite delicious.

I will definitely be making these again for people for the holidays! It’s the perfect Christmas time treat.

Last but not least, I wanted to talk about how many dishes I used. I will start off by saying I definitely could’ve cut down on my dish total if I had thought things through a little better, but I’m the kind of person that will throw something in the sink and then think, “oh wait I still needed that.”

That being said, I used the stand mixer bowl and paddle attachment, two rubber spatulas, one baking pan, one pot for the caramel, a cutting board and knife for the dates and pecans, a grater for the fresh ginger, and several measuring cups and teaspoons. Not horrible, at least it’s all stuff that can go in the dishwasher (minus the knife).

Another thing I really love about this recipe is that Justine provides alternatives like just using more pecans if you don’t like dates, you can make it nut-free with toasted pumpkin seeds, and if you want to make it gluten free you can just use one to one gluten free flour (she has the same favorite brand of flour as I do, King Arthur). Whilst I was making these and adding the cinnamon, I thought that they would be good with cardamom in them, and she actually says you can add some to make it even more holiday-warmth-esque!

So, yeah, I like how she writes her recipes, and I like the result of making these. Thank you, Justine, for another great recipe! She’s actually one of the few food content creator’s cookbooks I have. I even preordered it.

How do you feel about these ginger bars? Do you like fresh ginger? Are you a fan of dates? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/trying-out-a-new-recipe-justine-dorions-sticky-ginger-bars/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58761

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seventeen-pleasantville/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58743

Nostalgia is a trap. The people who indulge in it do so with selective memory, either their own or someone else’s. When I was a kid in the 80s, people looked back yearningly at the 50s as a simpler and better time, when families were nuclear, entertainment was wholesome and a slice of pie was just a nickel, conveniently eliding the segregation of black citizens, the communist witch hunts, and the fact that women couldn’t get things like credit cards or mortgages without a husband or some other male authority. Later people started looking at the 80s the way the 80s looked at the 50s, and they enjoyed the dayglo colors and the cheeky music and forgot apartheid, the cold war, leaded gas and smoking everywhere, or the fact that gay men were dying of AIDS and the US government (for one) couldn’t be persuaded to give a shit. I don’t feel nostalgia for the 80s; I lived in it. A whole lot of things about it were better left behind.

And still, nostalgia persists, because being an adult is complicated, and that time when you were a kid (or frankly, didn’t even exist yet) was uncomplicated. You didn’t have make any decisions yet, and all the awful things about the era existed in a realm you didn’t really have to consider. The golden age of anything is twelve, old enough to see what’s going on and not old enough to understand it.

Pleasantville is all about the trap of nostalgia and how its surface pleasures require an unexamined life. Tobey Maguire, in one of his first big roles, plays David, a high school student with a sucky home life who is obsessed with the 50s TV show Pleasantville, a sort of Father Knows Best knock-off where there patriarchy is swell and there is no problem that can’t be resolved in a half hour. For a kid from a broken home, whose mom is about to sneak off for a weekend assignation in a moderately-priced hotel, Pleasantville sounds like paradise.

That is, until David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are, by way of a magical remote control, whisked away to Pleasantville itself, in all its monochromatic 50s glory, and forced to take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the two kids of the series’ main family. For Jennifer, who is a Thoroughly Modern Millennial, this is a fate worse than death; she had plans for the weekend, and they didn’t involve dressing up like a square. David, on the other hand, is initially delighted. He knows the series inside and out, is excited to be in the highly delineated world of his favorite show, and assures his perturbed sister that as long as they play the roles assigned to them, everything will be fine until they find their way back to the 90s.

You don’t have to be a devotee of 50s sitcoms to guess how long it takes until things start going awry. David and Jennifer, whether they intend to or not, are now the proverbial snakes in the garden, bringing knowledge into a formerly innocent world, sometimes literally (David tells other teens what’s in the formerly blank library books, and the words magically fill in) and sometimes also literally, but not using words (Jennifer introduces the concept of orgasms, and boy howdy, is that a game changer). As things get more complicated, some people get unhappy. And when some people get unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.

Pleasantville is not a subtle film by any stretch: when people start deviating from their assigned roles, they change from monochrome to color, which allows the film to label part of its uniformly Caucasian cast as “colored,” which… well, I know what extremely obvious allusion writer/director Gary Ross was trying to make here, and the best I can say about it is that it is not how I would have done it. Also, any film where a nice girl character offers a nice boy character an apple right off the tree is not trying to sneak anything past you. The movie wears its lessons and motivations right on its sleeve, and in neon.

What are subtle, though, are the performances. With the exception of J.T. Walsh, who plays the mayor of Pleasantville with big smiling back-slapping friendly menace, no one in this movie is overplaying their hand. We notice this first with David/Bud and Maguire’s bemused way of getting both of them through the world, both ours and Pleasantville’s. But then there’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the malt shop Bud works in, who is initially befuddled when things are out of sequence, but gets progressively delighted the more improvisation gets added into his life. Bud’s dad George (William H. Macy) finds his role as paterfamilias slipping away and is befuddled rather than angry about it. Even Jennifer, who initially comes in as a wrecking ball, finds a lower gear.

But the true heart of Pleasantville is Betty, Bud and Mary Sue’s mom, played by the always tremendous Joan Allen. Like everyone else in Pleasantville, Betty starts off as a naïf, who only knows what’s been written for her. But the more she strays from what she’s supposed to be doing and saying, the more she understands that what she’s “supposed” to be doing and saying stands in total opposition to what she actually needs — when, that is, she finds the wherewithal to both understand and act on those needs. Her transformation is bumpy, not without backtracks, and deeply affecting. Joan Allen did not get any awards for this film, but it is an award-worthy performance.

(Also award-worthy: Randy Newman’s score, which was in fact nominated for an Oscar.)

It’s this dichotomy — high concept, deeply ridiculous premise, and heartfelt, committed character performances — that fuels Pleasantville and makes it work better than it has any right to. It would have been so easy just to play this film as farce, and you know what? If the film had been played as farce, it would have been perfectly entertaining. Watch the latter-day Jumanji films, the ones with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black (and Karen Gillan! Whose comedic talents are underrated!) and you’ll see how playing a ridiculous concept almost purely as farce can be both amusing and profitable. There is a world where Pleasantville is one of those 90s comedy movies whose titles on the movie posters were big chunky red letters. It’s just not this world, and the film is better for it.

By now at least some of you may have figured out why I find Pleasantville so compelling and watchable. What Ross is doing in this movie is the same sort of thing I do in a lot of my writing: Take a truly ridiculous, almost risibly farcical concept, and then make characters have real lives in the middle of it. You’ll see me doing it in Redshirts and Starter Villain and especially in When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which, you’ll recall, I turned the moon into cheese. A lot of people think doing this sort of thing is easy, which, one, good, I try to make it look like that, and two, if you actually think it’s easy to do, try it. It takes skill, and not everyone has it, and not every book or play or TV show or movie that attempts it gets it right.

Pleasantville gets it right. It looks at the pleasures of nostalgia and says, you know what, it’s not actually all that great when you think about it. It’s no better than the real world and the modern day.

It’s hard to believe it just now, but there will come a time when someone looks back at 2025 and thinks, what a simpler, better time that was. Not because their world is that much worse (I mean, shit, I hope not), but because by then all of this will be rubbed smooth and easy and someone who is twelve now will remember it as carefree. Those of us over twelve will know better what lies underneath pleasant nostalgia. So does this film. Nostalgia is never as great as you remember it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seventeen-pleasantville/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58743

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/16/a-small-book-haul-from-pegasus-books/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58718

Someone commented on my last post that one thing that helps them feel like a home is a home is putting books into bookshelves, and I must say they were totally right! A beautifully arranged and well stocked bookshelf makes a world of difference, and I thought now would be a perfect time to show off some books I got recently. (Also, thank you to everyone that commented such supp0rtive, nice messages! It really helped a lot and I appreciate all of you.)

When I was in San Francisco last month, I stopped by Pegasus Books, a bookstore that sells tons of used and new books, as well as lots of book adjacent goods like notebooks, puzzles, and greetings cards.

Though I was tempted to go wild, I knew whatever I bought I had to put in my suitcase, and by the time I made that realization I had already picked up two very bulky and heavy books, so I started to consider my choices more carefully.

That being said, here’s the books I ended up with:

And for the non-books:

Not pictured is a small, floral embroidered notebook I picked up for a friend, and a soft-bound notebook with “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” that I also sent to a friend (with an accompanying Great Wave notecard from that box of Hokusai notecards!). Also not pictured is the book I bought for The Prisoners Literature Project, an organization that believes everyone has the right to read, and you can buy books for incarcerated people at Pegasus Books! I don’t remember the name of what I bought, but it was just a paperback of forty classic short stories. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

So let’s talk about what is pictured. The only new book I bought was Something From Nothing, which is a book that literally just released last month and was something on my birthday and Christmas list. It’s a book that focuses on using pantry staples and making good, home cooked meals from simple ingredients. I figured I could use it since I’m about to cooking at home a lot more often than I have in the past.

Next up is The Foreign Cinema Cookbook: Recipes and Stories Under the Stars. I had no idea what The Foreign Cinema is, but it was the sheer size and heftiness of this book that caught my eye. It’s definitely poking into coffee-table-book size, and it was only eighteen dollars despite the inside of the book saying it was $40.

I ended up looking up the Foreign Cinema and finding out that it’s a restaurant in the area that also screens movies that opened in 1999! The book is written by the owners who are also the chefs, and has 125 of their signature recipes from the movie-focused restaurant. I love how beautiful this book is, it has some seriously stunning photos and extremely intriguing recipes in it. It was a steal, for sure.

Palestine on a Plate was prominently displayed right in front of the cookbook section, and there were actually two copies of it. I can honestly say I have never had Palestinian food, and even worse than that I realized I probably couldn’t name any dishes the country is known for. I feel like there’s no better time to invest in and learn about Palestinian culture, food, and history. It’s also a beautifully photographed book with absolutely incredible sounding recipes. I am looking forward to making recipes from such a rich and incredible culture.

If you’re curious about the non-books, I honestly can’t tell you why I was so interested in chili pepper notecards. I just thought the art was so cool and fun, and I’m always in the market for more cards to send to people (I say that as I have neglected my pen pals for uhh two years now). The pickleball notebook is actually for my cousin who loves pickleball, but don’t tell her because it’s supposed to be a Christmas gift! As for the Hokusai print notecards, again I always want more cards with cool art, and honestly I just think he has such an awesome style.

So there you have it! I’m not even remotely surprised that basically the only thing I left with was cookbooks and notecards. If I ever walk into a bookstore and don’t buy a cookbook, just know I’ve been replaced by a robot or alien.

Have you been to Pegasus Books before? Have you heard of Foreign Cinema? Do you like Hokusai art? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/16/a-small-book-haul-from-pegasus-books/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58718

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-fifteen-this-is-spinal-tap/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58705

For more than two weeks, I had it on my schedule to write about This is Spinal Tap today, December 15, 2025. The day before this, director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer were (allegedly) murdered in their home. I sat in my office a lot of the day trying to decide whether to keep this on the schedule, whether to delay it, or whether to remove it from the list of comfort watches entirely, to be replaced by some other movie. I can’t pretend that Reiner’s death isn’t on my mind right now. I can’t pretend that it doesn’t make me terribly sad. I can’t pretend that a vast number of other people feel similarly, not even counting those who knew and loved him personally.

Here’s the thing. A day like this is exactly the day for a comfort watch, a movie that can give you joy at the lowest of times. This is Spinal Tap offers a lot of joy. It is one of the funniest movies ever made, a movie that can make you laugh until you cry, and also, make you laugh even if you have been crying. It is a film for a moment like this, when one feels bereft and out to sea and nothing makes sense.

So, you know what, fuck it. Whaddya say, let’s boogie.

Rob Reiner, it should be noted, was a master of comfort watch genre. When Harry Met Sally? Total romantic comfort watch. The American President? Total political comfort watch (although harder to get into at the moment, given the state of the White House). Stand By Me? Absolute “coming of age” comfort watch. And, of course, The Princess Bride, arguably the Greatest Comfort Watch of All Time, as I have essayed elsewhere. There’s probably no other single filmmaker whose entire canon is so damn rewatchable. This is not a skill that necessarily wins awards (Reiner was nominated for the Oscar only once, for A Few Good Men, a true legal comfort watch), but it is a skill that endears a filmmaker to their audience and peers. Rob Reiner is beloved, by fans and colleagues, like few modern filmmakers are.

It all had to start somewhere, cinematically speaking, and Spinal Tap was where it began, Reiner’s first feature film as director. It was not the first “mockumentary” ever made, or even the first rock-themed mockumentary: Eric Idle’s All You Need is Cash, which followed a Beatles knockoff band called The Rutles, for one, precedes it by six years. But it’s the one that really seemed to stick in the public consciousness. Riffing off the Beatles is one thing; that’s a known quantity. Spinal Tap, now. No one quite knew what they were getting into with this one.

The premise: Filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Reiner himself) documents the 1982 US tour of Spinal Tap, a British hard rock band, whose new album, Smell the Glove, is on the verge of release. The band consists of singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), plus touring keyboardist Viv Savage (David Kaff) and drummer Mick Shrimpton (RJ Parnell), to whom one should not get too attached. As the film starts, there’s a big launch party and a mostly successful concert, and everything seems to be going well. And then…

Well, and then everything that can goes wrong starts to go wrong, and in truly awful ways: Cover art controversies, dropped tour dates, venue navigation issues, technical problems involving Stonehenge, the list goes on. The band and their manager Ian (Tony Hendra) try to weather this all while DiBergi gets it on film, interspersed with archival footage and interview scenes in which the band are asked to explain, among other things, what’s happened to all those drummers over the years.

The movie is famously almost entirely improvised, mostly Reiner, McKean, Guest and Shearer but also, one assumes, by the supporting cast as well, who are (generally) not saying as many funny things, but are certainly giving the band members things to play off of. What are not improvised are the songs, both the “in concert” and archival numbers, in which the members of the band, their actors all also actual musicians, are playing their parts. The “live” song as the full-fledged Spinal Tap are indeed loud and ridiculous, in a way that’s only a smidge off from actual early 80s hard rock and heavy metal. But for my money the real gold is in the archival bits, where Spinal Tap, with earlier members and earlier names, surf through whichever rock genres are of the moment, from Merseybeat to psychedelia.

In one beautiful bit, David and Nigel talk about the the first song they ever wrote together, and even sing a bit of it, a little snippet of skiffle called “All the Way Home.” It is, unreservedly, lovely, and the best song in the film. In that one moment, we learn something really important about David and Nigel (and by extension, the band): They in fact have the capacity to be really good musicians, and have had that capacity right from the start. But then rock n’ roll kind of got in the way.

Spinal Tap is about a lot of mostly small things, but what it is mostly about is the relationship of David and Nigel (with Derek, who in another life would be a weird mead-swilling druid lurking in a valley, there for non-sequitur pseudo-philosophy). David and Nigel are two blokes who knew each other since childhood, trying to stay friends when everything is falling apart around them. Hilariously so, sure, which is great for us. But for them, it’s their lives, and while other things are played for laughs, the way these two feel about each other is the film’s unexpectedly serious emotional core. You might not notice that, the first two or three or eleven times you watch the movie. But look for it the next time you watch it. It’s there.

This film is beloved of cinema fans and lovers of comedy, but the people who really seem to love it are musicians, particularly of the 70s and 80s rock era, many of whom experienced in real life the various mishaps Spinal Tap have fictionally. Ozzy Osbourne is legendarily supposed have thought the film was an actual documentary the first time he watched it, and honestly, if anyone was like to have these sort of touring misfortunes befall him, it would be Ozzy.

Far from being offended that McKean, Guest and Shearer were taking the piss at rock, hard rock musicians embraced the trio and the band — in 1985, in the midst of the “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and “We Are The World” era of charity singles, heavy metal and hard rock bands came together as Hear N’ Aid to make their own charity single, “Stars.” Who was there alongside members of Dio, Judas Priest, Motley Crue and Quiet Riot? Why, Spinal Tap, of course!

For a fictional band, Spinal Tap has been prolific, with four albums in total, two of which are independent of a film. There were few actual tours in there as well, with McKean, Guest and Shearer playing their respective characters to much acclaim. There have been other successful fictional bands, from the Monkees to Huntr/x, but no one else has so successfully made the leap into being beloved after being portrayed as so, well, stupid. Spinal Tap is the best proof out there that hard rock and heavy metal fans are in on the joke, and love it.

Four decades (and one year) after This is Spinal Tap, Reiner, McKean, Guest and Shearer reunited for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which was about the hapless-yet-storied band reuniting for one last (contractually obliged) show. We know now that this is the last feature film Reiner would ever make, although there is apparently a Spinal Tap concert film film completed as well (Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale). Either way, Reiner’s film career is bookended by this fabulous, ridiculous band, doing their thing to the delight, confusion and hearing damage of fans.

It’s bittersweet and also unexpectedly lovely. How many of us get to go back to where we began? How many of us truly get to come full circle in our careers? Rob Reiner, who created some of the best, most entertaining and enduring films in his era of Hollywood, has done what David and Nigel sang first and best. He has come, truly, all the way home.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-fifteen-this-is-spinal-tap/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58705

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/rob-reiner-rip/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58689

I don’t have much to add about Rob Reiner and wife Michelle Singer’s shocking death that other people haven’t said better, likewise any more to add about his career and political activism. It’s clear he was a good man and a very good filmmaker. What I will say is that very few people, much less filmmakers, had the sort of career run that he had as a director between 1984 and 1992: This is Spinal Tap. The Sure Thing. Stand by Me. The Princess Bride. When Harry Met Sally. Misery. A Few Good Men.

I mean, come on. With the exception of The Sure Thing, every single one of those is a stone classic, and The Sure Thing is still pretty good! It made a star out of John Cusack! There are things we still say because Rob Reiner directed the film those words were in: “This one goes to 11.” “As you wish.” “You can’t handle the truth,” and so on. You could go a whole day talking to people by only quoting Rob Reiner films and you could absolutely get away with it. No disrespect to Stephen King, Aaron Sorkin, William Goldman, Nora Ephron, etc who wrote the words, obviously. It’s Reiner who gave those words the platform to become immortal.

It’s odd and in retrospect a little enraging that in that entire run of films, Reiner was nominated for an Oscar only once, as a producer on A Few Good Men, and not ever since then. One sole Oscar nomination, not only for his own work, but for the work his production company had a hand in. Of course others were nominated because they were in or worked on his films and Kathy Bates even won, for Misery. But for Reiner himself, that one single nomination. It’s a reminder that what wins awards, and what stays in people’s hearts and minds, are sometimes very different things when it comes to movies.

If you want to know who Rob Reiner was as a filmmaker, here he is:

The beloved man who comes to you at a low point, spins you a tale, and then, when it’s done and you say to him that you would be happy to hear another story sometime, says “as you wish.” Rob Reiner’s work was and is beloved and it will last because of it.

He did good. He’s going to be missed. He is missed. This hurts.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/rob-reiner-rip/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58689