The Online Photographer

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. I've written a lot of off-topic posts lately. Too many. And I'm not a great movie reviewer—I don't have much in the way of pithy insight, nor am I very good at articulating why I like the movies I like. To be honest, I wasn't a very good book reviewer in school either. I'd rather think my own thoughts than rehearse, report, or pick apart the thoughts of others. But maybe I'm a good movie recommender; that could be a useful service to you, since good movies are rare and we're all on the lookout for the good ones.

And even if we don't agree, reviewers can be good negative barometers as well. If you learn that your taste differs consistently from mine, then you'll learn to stay away from films I like. Some of the most important critics in my life were ones I decided I consistently disagreed with.

Without further ado....]

[UPDATE added at the end of the post. —Ed.]

I've really been enjoying the free movies on YouTube Premium lately. I try to watch one on Saturday nights. I gather there are a few commercials you have to sit through if you don't subscribe to YouTube Premium.

Double Indemnity
Like good books, it's tough to find good movies. I already wrote about David Lean's early masterpiece Brief Encounter, which is a wonderful find. In recent weeks I also finally caught up with the famous film noir standout Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder. (Warning: spoilers ahead about this one.) I watched it after seeing Wilder's Sunset Boulevard for the third time, a movie I like better the more I learn about it. It gave me the idea that I really ought to watch all of Billy Wilder's movies. I took a pass on Double Indemnity when I was young and in my "movie-watching years" (ages 12–25 maybe? Give or take) because I didn't think I could get behind a movie in which the main protagonist was the milquetoast Dad from the inane TV show My Three Sons. But the TV show has faded to almost nothing in my memory now and I could finally accept Fred McMurray as the hardboiled but conned insurance agent on a collision course with fate. Double Indemnity is better than I thought it would be and I liked it more than I thought I would.

The only plot twist I didn't particularly care for, that little thorn in my side, is that the evil dame gets it in the end. Even though her death is perfunctory, not very important in the story, and almost a toss-off onscreen. That plot-point expresses 1950s movie morality: audiences didn't approve of "bad women" and liked it better when they got their comeuppance in no uncertain terms (two shots, not one, so you know she's dead). And she learns her feelings were actually sincere all along after she shoots him once? So she's not actually a narcissistic manipulating psychopath after all? C'mon now. That's that audience-mollifying morality again. It would have been fine to leave her fate hanging, knowing she'd get hers because of the tape-recorded confession; the protagonist had already killed the husband, so we know he's done for.

It's a small gripe. The movie is a fine noir with most of the wonderful qualities of that genre. Especially, in this case, the rapid-fire dialogue, which gets in your head. Did people just talk better back then? And superb performances, especially from Edward G. Robinson, who I've learned to appreciate only in recent years. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, Kingdom of Romania, in the 1890s) was before my time, an "old" movie star from before I was born. But, come to find out, he's fantastic. I first saw him in the noir film Scarlet Street, and then an odd period piece called The Red House. Actually I probably saw him first in Little Caesar many years ago, but I have kind of a fraught relationship to old gangster films. And to shoot-'em-ups in general. Watching people kill people with guns doesn't appeal. I only recently watched Goodfellas for the first time because my editor at The New Yorker wanted me to. (And I admit, it was great.)

Sorry, I'm free associating. The black-and-white cinematography of Double Indemnity is also highly enjoyable if you ask me, but maybe that's just me.

A Beautful Mind (a plug for the book)
I already mentioned that I watched A Beautiful Mind (2001) directed by Ron Howard. It's quite good and very skillful at translating difficult material to the screen. Honestly, though, if you're going to invest in this story, the book by Sylvia Nasar (1998) is better by a good stretch. A terrific biography. While it also necessarily simplifies the story of John Nash, translating impermeable material (it has to imply the mathematical life to non-mathematicians and also portray the experience of schizophrenia, both of which are a big challenge to get across to normal lay people), it's able to go much deeper than the movie. The movie is excellent for what it is but the material isn't a natural fit for the medium. The best thing about the movie—you read this again and again in viewer's comments on social media—is probably that audiences were fooled into thinking the increasingly bizarre plot of his descent into madness is real, and then enjoyed the reveal. But I already knew the story.

My little thorn-in-the-side with this movie is the fact that the real Mrs. Nash was Hispanic. Don't get me wrong, I'd watch Jennifer Connelly cook pork chops—she's entrancingly beautiful, and I get a little hypnotized—but casting her in this role is an example of "whitewashing," one that's not called for for any dramatic reason. Alicia Nash (née Lardé Lopez-Harrison), a Salvadorean physicist, was a fascinating figure in her own right, and gets a little too much swept under the rug here. The movie elides too much of the depth and subtlety of her role and journey in Nash's life. Look to the book.

Quiz Show
A real gem, and a surprise, one I didn't expect to love, is Quiz Show (1994) directed by the actor and all-'round movie maven Robert Redford, whose Sundance Film Festival is almost as big an accomplishment in the field as his long list of starring roles. While the premise lands with a thud when you hear about it, which is probably what caused the film's tepid performance at the box office (that and the fact that it came out in the same year as Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Forrest Gump), the movie itself is top drawer from first to last. A great story, skillfully and effortlessly told. No nagging flaws, even, although the real-life timeline is streamlined. And, speaking of Goodfellas, Martin Scorcese himself plays a minor role.

My taste in movies is so specific and my standards so prickly, and I'm so fundamentally impatient with video, that most movies are a waste of time for me. I get a sense almost of gratitude when I manage to find another movie that engages me all the way through like this one did. Recommended, if you missed it.

Quiz Show actually led me directly to the movie I watched last night. The jilted quiz show champion forced to take a dive for the handsome, impeccably connected Charles Van Doren—Ralph Fiennes playing yet another villain, albeit one of a different sort—was Herb Stempel, a geeky Jewish everyman with a genius for trivia portrayed adroitly by John Turturro (the two even look a lot alike). Herb Stempel doesn't want to give up his place on the pedestal, and he's particularly galled by the fact that the question he's supposed to miss is "What won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1955?" Against his objections, Stempel is forced to answer On the Waterfront when he knows full well the answer is Marty. Not only would anyone know the correct answer, he says, but Marty is a personal favorite of his, a movie he'd seen three times.

Marty
Taking the cue, last night I watched Marty (1955), directed by first-time movie director Delbert Mann and starring Ernest Borgnine playing against type. It's the shortest movie ever to win Best Picture, 91 minutes, and one of the few great movies to be adapted from a television show rather than the other way around. It was an episode of a show called "The Philco Television Playhouse." The bones (writing and story) are impeccable, with a screenplay by the great Paddy Chayefsky from his own teleplay. Chayefsky said, "I set out in Marty to write...the most ordinary love story in the world. I didn't want my hero to be handsome, and I didn't want the girl to be pretty. I wanted to write a love story the way it would literally have happened to the kind of people I know."

He succeeded. Marty might be somewhat slight, but it's utterly charming, and it is, for what it is, perfect in every way. You know the old expression "they don't make 'em like they used to"? I think it was movie critic James Berardinelli who called Marty the poster child for that. A naturalistic, sparingly written, beautifully photographed, well-directed, superbly acted, character-driven drama about real life. The action takes place in little more than 24 hours, the people are believable, it reads true from a psychological perspective, and it has one of the best endings I've seen: understated and swift yet warmly satisfying, releasing in a deft, brief, minor, perfectly natural act all of the tensions that had been building throughout the afternoon (for the characters) and for many minutes on end (for the audience).

Mike's verdict? Essence of "movie." Yeah, it's a heart-warmer and a crowd-pleaser, and might be too plain for those of you addicted to fantasy or gunplay or high art, but if I could find a lot more movies like Marty I'd count myself lucky. And no guns driving any of the action in this one, thank you Lord.

You owe it to yourself to see Marty if you've missed it, or if it came out before you were born. And hey, it's free.

Mike

[UPDATE: The Kino Lorber DVD and Blu-Ray of Marty features the five-minute scene of Clara talking to her parents after the date which is, for unexplained reasons, omitted from some other versions including the free streaming version on YouTube. The missing scene can be seen separately on YouTube. —Ed.]

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David B.: "Re '...in this case, the rapid-fire dialogue [of Double Indemnity], which gets in your head. Did people just talk better back then?' The dialogue was written by Billy Wilder, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler (who, incidentally, is briefly seen sitting outside the insurance office.) Which is why it bounces back and forth like a championship tennis rally."

bob palmieri: "Addressing just the aspect of B&W stage setting, lighting and cinematography, sheesh...have you watched Ripley? I honestly think I could teach a year long course in B&W craft just running that and pausing every 20 seconds or so."

Mike replies: Search and ye shall find.

Bear.: "Would Marty have been made by any Hollywood studio today? All excellent movies."

Mike replies: Well, I'm sure a more connected, knowledgeable movie person critic type could write an excellent essay on the extent to which the movie business has contorted the "product" these days compared to then, but I can't. Today's Hollywood movies are more the descendants of the 1959 William Wyler epic Ben-Hur than they are of Marty: spend lavishly, advertise heavily to insure immediate interest and return (note how movie news always breathlessly reports how much the opening weekend take was, like any moviegoer with an interest in the art of film could care), saturate the product with the Hollywood equivalent of salt-sugar-fat, meaning sex, violence, gore, gunplay, fantasy, special effects and excess, make sure "stars" from celebrity culture are present, then spend yet more money campaigning to get Oscars, and you've got your formula for today's blockbusters. It's a business much more than an art, although the art part still survives here and there, battered and bloody.

But that's for "Hollywood" ("a shorthand term for the American film and television industry, particularly focusing on the major studios based in Los Angeles and the surrounding area" —AI overview) and for an asterisked value of "today," because COVID-19 dealt a body-blow to the Hollywood norms that prevailed six years ago that hasn't shaken out yet. I'm even less qualified to write about that. But small, low-budget, character-driven dramas taken from real life, with real photography of live action shot on location and dependent on good writing, acting, and direction? Yeah, that exists, but about like two-seater sports cars or new film cameras still exist.

I know how I sound, but just because I sound like a crusty cynical old codger doesn't mean I'm wrong. :-)

Reacting to the "Ode to Old Lenses" post below, I got this comment:

John Bour [lightly edited]: "OK, sorry Mike, only a few sentences in, and this triggered me to react (will read the undoubtedly interesting rest of your post after getting this off my chest). What is it with you Americans that you feel compelled to replace a word like s--t with 'stuff' or sh*t? We are adults; no kids read this blog, and if they do their souls will not be spoiled by reading s--t (or 'the f-word, the n-word [see below —Ed.] etc). Grow up (not you personally, but the US as a nation). So much s--tty stuff going on in your country and the world in general, but oy oy...we can not expose our adult readership to s--t like s--t. We and our kids can consume a s--tload of violence on TV, porn on the web....

"Who are you trying to protect with this prudishness, and from what? Any bigot who is offended by seeing the word s--t instead of sh*t is not worth protecting!

"S--t, sorry, I got carried away. Longtime follower of your blog, daily visitor. European, so that might explain my irritation. Keep up the good work! Back to reading your post.  ;-)  John."

Mike replies: Sorry back, but it amused me to edit the sh*t out of your complaint. Literally. No offense!  :-)

Our no profanity proscription is because, at least in early days, it was rumored that institutions such as schools had filters in place to disallow sites with profanity from being accessed. I never even knew for sure if that was true, but it made sense, so I opted to err on the side of caution. Besides, if one almost never uses profanity, it increases the impact when one does. But in general, I'm not a fan. The overuse of profanity is "the inarticulate mind attempting to express itself forcefully."

I've been a big believer in politeness from early on. My father had a pushbutton rant against politeness; he would say, bitterly, "politeness is so fake," and elaborate accordingly. I guess he considered it an authenticity issue: "People should say what they really think," and "politeness is just a bunch of lies," and so forth. I was maybe 13 when I first engaged with that argument: my position was, of course it's fake. That's its purpose. If everyone went around saying what they really think all the time, we'd create a whole society with a sludgey, sticky coating of slouching, snarling insult all over everything. We'd all go about the world in little bubbles of self-aggrandizing narcissism, dismissing and degrading others. And being battered willy-nilly by the slings and arrows of others, as they ran roughshod over our own feelings in return. Human beings are self-centered and prejudiced by nature. Politeness is the custom of keeping social order by encouraging people not to give vent to the foul spewing dyspepsia in their hearts all the time and at every turn. It's not just useful. It's essential.

Avoiding profanity is classic "middlebrow" politeness behavior. See Chapter 5, "Middlebrow Culture from Noon to Twilight," in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies.

Mary, on a Summer's day
Two little data points. My father was notably misogynistic, and had a special animus toward women who he thought talked too much, because his mother, my paternal grandmother, had that characteristic, or so he said. My same-age cousin Chris and I both have loyal and loving memories of Gran, and neither of us remember that. But then, we were six when she died. And we probably listened. According to my father, when Gran would call, he would set the receiver down and go do something else, and she would talk on without him. My mother said that wasn't true, but if it wasn't, my father liked to say it was.

Anyway, when my father took a governmental position and we moved to Washington D.C. in the 1970s, we had a very friendly neighbor across the street named Mary. I wouldn't say Mary was pathological about it (it's called logorrhea in its extreme form), but she, too, could sparkle with streams of rapid skittering talk when she wanted to. She was light and kind, with a breeziness that covered an underlayment of anxiousness and emotional fragility. Another delightful but maybe somewhat ditzy thing about Mary was that she and her husband had been posted in Britain for seven years, and she had come home with a permanent British accent. She just liked it. My father, who I'm sure only socialized with these neighbors under duress, had some pent-up opinions about this that we heard about once or twice at home. He thought she was "putting on airs" as the descendants of hillbillies would put it. My father put on airs himself, but with French. He would use certain French words as replacements for the English ones even though he had never made much headway in his long-term quest to learn to speak French.

One fine Summer's day Mary came across the street to tell us she had accepted a package for us or some such, some little neighborly thing, and she ended up exchanging words with my father, who spoke down to her through an upstairs window. The conversation somehow turned that way, so he took the occasion to unload on her everything on his mind where she was concerned. He told her she talked too g*ddamn much, that nobody liked her on account of it (not true; only true of him), that everybody thought so and said so behind her back (also not true), et cetera. From there it would have been only a short segue to his acidic opinions of her accent, I'm sure. Apparently he calmly went on in this vein for some time, "letting her have it" as he would put it. Well, poor Mary, who had only been being friendly, was so upset at all this that she went home, vomited several times, and then cried for the rest of the afternoon. Finally her husband Jack came home from work and could comfort her. Jack, who was British but had learned an American accent for his job as a supermarket executive, was a courtly, white-haired, well-regulated gentleman, genial and even-tempered to all, but he was livid about this casually cruel treatment of his wife, or as livid as he ever got anyway (though not so angry as to swear I'm sure). It was probably a good thing for neighborhood harmony that when Jack marched over to protest, my father was no longer home, and my mother was able to soothe him.

What had been needed there was a dash of politeness, if you please. A soupçon of consideration for the feelings of others. But no, that would have been "fake."

The hungry shark
The second thing John Bour's comment about sh*t brought to mind is a couple of jokes I heard in Ireland when I was there for the only time in my life. Long story, but when I was about twenty I had to use a plane ticket to Ireland because I couldn't get a refund for it. I liked Ireland so much when I was there it made me think about going there to live; I would dearly love to go there again before I die. I was still drinking at the time, so I spent a lot of time in pubs sucking down dark brown stout. Right off the plane at Shannon I sat next to an Irishman who told me a joke. Seems there was an English ship that went down off the coast of the Republic. The Irish sharks each got their own sailor on whom to feast except one. When the others were consoling him for going hungry, they asked him why he didn't get a sailor for himself. He said he came across one all right, but it was a bare-chested drowned sailor who had a big tattoo across his chest. "The tattoo said 'BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES,' said the mournful Irish shark, 'and I couldn't very well swallow that sh*t, now, could I?'"

From that, I learned to ask my fellow imbibers in pubs whether they knew any jokes. Of course they all did. I heard some epic Irish jokes on that trip as a result, some of which took twenty minutes to tell, some of which were embroidered and enameled from a great many rehearsals, and some of which I remember to this day. What follows was the one I liked the most. I'll do my best to reproduce it, but the young man who told it to me had told it many times and was nicely practiced, and of course he knew all the proper Irishisms and had the tones of voice down pat. You'll have to excuse my written imitation as pale by comparison.

Seems Paddy came home from work one afternoon to find his wife Bridy in a terrible state. Dirty, clothes ripped and torn, with bruises on her arms and a cold beefsteak pressed against a black eye. This made Paddy fly into a rage. Brandishing his fists, he demanded to know where she had been. "I had a doctor's appointment today with that young doctor down the lane—Tim O'Leary, Conor and Keira O'Leary's boy," she moaned, at which Paddy cried, "He did this to ye, did he, that Tim? Say that and I'll go give him what for! I'll kill him with my hands, I swear I shall!" But Bridy said, "No, no, Tim didn't lay a hand on me he shouldn't have, calm yerself down. He was a perfect gentleman. Don't fly off the handle, Paddy, till you hear my whole story!"

"Tim and them couldn't have been nicer," she continued, "and my checkup went well, but then he wanted me to pee into a little bottle, you know, like they do? Well, I tried, but I could nae, in such a strange place. So I says, may I go home up the hill to my own house, and fill yer wee bottle there, Doctor Tim, where I can be myself? And he says, all right, Bridy, all right.

"So I came home and did as I said. And as I was heading back down the hill, who should I meet comin' up the hill but that Mairead Corrigan. Well, you know how Mairead and I never got on since we was girls together. And she's always so fake-polite to me on account of it. So I quick whips my little bottle behind my back lest she see it and ask what it is. You know how she pries. But I think maybe I was a split too late, and she's seen me done it.

"An' she says, all sly, 'Why, hello Bridy, how do ye do?' And I says, 'Fine, thank ye, Mairead. And how are you?' And she says, 'Quite well, Bridy, and how is Paddy?' And I says, 'he's fine as ever he is.' And she says, prying, 'And where you be getting off to this fine day?' And I says, 'To the doctor, Mairead, young Tim down the lane,' and she pulls back from me and says, 'Yer sick are ye? And talkin' at my face like that!' and I says, 'No, no, it's a well visit, I'm getting my yearly,' and then she comes out with it. She cocks her head at me sidewise, an' she says, all sweet, 'And what's—that—ye—got—behind—yer—back?'

"And I answers her, a bit too fierce, 'Piss in a bottle!' An' she takes a start, cocks her fists and cries, 'Sh*t in yer hat, you old bitch!' An' the fight was on!"

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Paul Emberger: "Firstly, I don't mind profane language, myself. I don't think it is always used to insult or be crude. Though I do agree with you, Mike, I prefer a polite society over rude. That said, I need to address this portion of John's comment: 'We are adults; no kids read this blog, and if they do their souls will not be spoiled by reading s--t (or 'the f-word, the n-word etc).' Please don't speak so casually about using the 'n' word. As a Europeaner, perhaps you don't have a full grasp of the history of this word. Personally, having grown up in an inner city, and loved many black people, both friends and romantically, in fact my wife is black, I have a strong, negative personal reaction to it, no matter who uses it. But here in the US, it is entirely inappropriate for a white person, honestly anyone except for a black American, to use that word. I would strongly suggest if you ever visit the United States, you never use it. Also, I would implore you to not use it at home in your own country either. It is an awful word with an awful history, that is only used by some black American people now because they have taken the power out of it. It is their right, and their right alone. Anybody else who uses it, is either ignorant of this or is just ignorant themselves."

John Bour replies (partial comment; see his entire reply in the Comments Section): "I sincerely apologise for mentioning the 'n-word' as an example of silly prudeness. I am fully aware of the connotations, and the offensiveness to the African American community. It is in another league than harmless words (in my humble opinion) like sh*t, or less harmless ones like f*ck, and I agree, its use is never acceptable, other than within that community itself. But...replacing the i with an asterix, in a word that any adult knows, and nobody in his/her right mind should be offended by, is just...silly. Silly, patronising and hypocritical...."

Mike adds: Thanks, John, for providing the fodder for this post! I was having fun with it, and I hope not too much at your expense. I always found it excruciating—currently spelled "cringe-worthy" or shortened to "cringe"—when my genteel mother, who went to a finishing school and never even heard swearing until she was an adult, self-consciously used profanity because she thought it made her sound hip and young. Ugh. That's echoed when The New Yorker spells out the f-bomb for the exact same reason and with the exact same effect on me.  

Another aspect we didn't talk about is "the style sheet." Any publication has a list of procedures it uses for consistency. These can be quite extensive—see for example The Chicago Manual of Style, also called CMOS. Examples at TOP: When editing Featured Comments, I preserve British spelling if the commenter uses it, like your "apologise," but change the punctuation markings to align with American typographical customs. Or: This publication uses a punctuation mark called an "ellipsis," which looks like this: ... , and then adds a period if the ellipsis occurs at the end of a sentence, like this.... Some publications allow two or three ellipses one after the other, thus six or nine dots, but I don't. So we only use three dots and four dots and that's it. Featured Commenters are not allowed to get away with things like.....................

I keep it all in my head, but the style sheet for TOP would be many pages long if I wrote it all out. And replacing a vowel with an asterisk in certain words that are offensive to some people is just the way I do it here, that's all. All style-sheet conventions are just decisions made by the editor(s) as to how to handle certain situations so that it's always done the same way. One magazine I worked for did not allow one-word widows. So if that's how the text fell on the page, you'd have to step in and add an extra word or two just to push two words into the widow. I, of course, used to play with this, so one time when I got my galleys back with the instruction to remedy a one-word widow I changed the word "freaky" to "freakazoid," which was long enough to do the trick. The galley came right back with a heavy red line through "freakazoid" and the terse marginal note, "do over"...which was the proper, standardized, conventional marking; God forbid the M.E. should write something in the margin like "STOP F*CKING AROUND!!!!!" Famous style-sheet anomalies in national publications are that The New Yorker, going it all alone, uses quotation marks for book titles instead of italics because founding editor Harold Ross made that fateful mistake in 1925, and The New York Times has a longstanding tradition of grimly and rigidly using honorifics no matter who they're talking about, with the incongruous result that the horrific murdering psychopath Jeffrey Dahmer, say, becomes "Mr. Dahmer" in the paper. Those are silly too, but that's the tyranny of the style sheet.

Alan Whiting: "A quote from Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long: 'Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalitites as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they pour sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.' The Spectator (ca. 1711–12) especially commends politeness between husband and wife. Mike, it seems to me you're in good company."

Sean: "I had an Aunt Bridy myself. I can’t recall ever hearing her swear, but her brother, my father, was a world-class curser, as was my mother. Ireland’s oral tradition helped them craft curses like, 'I hope your hole corrupts and festers.' Looking back, I see it as affiliative cursing. I’m all for affiliative politeness, but other types can be cold—especially in the hands of the passive-aggressive and the condescending. And as Ireland knows too well, the English were masters at keeping up appearances while keeping others down."

George: "School 'profanity filters' were real, or at least they were in the early 2000s. We taught an adult course in basic computing at a Government-run college, and one of the textbook exercises involved looking up the 'superbowl' website. The URL included roman numerals which triggered the blocking filter for 'XXX' e.g. Superbowl XXXIV."

[Misunderstanding Avoidance Dept.: Intended as

HUMOR!

Didn't actually make the recipe. Just imagining
how it would most likely go for me if I tried.
You can skim the recipe part if you wish. —Mike]

-

Quinoa and Broccoli Spoon Salad from the NY Times

This easy chopped salad fits loads of texture and flavor onto a spoon by combining finely chopped raw broccoli with chewy dried cranberries, crunchy pecans, fluffy quinoa and chunks of sharp Cheddar cheese. The mixture is tossed in a punchy mustard vinaigrette that soaks into the florets, only getting better as it sits.

Prep Time: 30 minutes [but see below]

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

• Kosher salt
• 1 cup quinoa, rinsed
• 1 lemon
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 large bunch broccoli (about 1½ pounds)
• 1 medium tart and crisp apple
• 4 ounces sharp Cheddar
• ¾ cup toasted pecans, roughly chopped
• ½ cup dried cranberries

Preparation

Step 1
Bring a medium pot of water to a boil on high and season aggressively with salt. Add the quinoa, then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer; cook until plump and tender, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a fine-mesh sieve; rinse with cool water and drain well.

Step 2
While the quinoa cooks, finely grate the zest of the lemon into a large bowl then cut the lemon in half. Add the olive oil, mustard, honey and apple cider vinegar, plus the juice of ½ lemon; whisk together. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Step 3
Peel the stem of the broccoli and trim off the dry end. Finely chop the entire broccoli and add to the dressing. Core the apple then finely chop the apple and the cheese; add to the broccoli and toss to combine.

Step 4
Add the cooked quinoa, nuts and cranberries and toss to combine. Taste and add more salt, pepper and lemon juice, as needed. Store, refrigerated, for up to 3 days.

Single bachelor's (SB's) first reaction: SB doesn't eat cheese. (This is a "position," meaning, sometimes I do eat cheese, I just disapprove of myself doing it.) And, raw broccoli?! I think not, having stood directly behind Ashley N. Titled at the grocery story the other day as she trawled through every single head of broccoli on her way to finding The One. But then, I find the first featured comment by Sue, from two years ago, which reads:

"Although this salad sounds great (with the exception of the cheddar, which I cannot eat) raw broccoli is not appealing. I always briefly parboil chopped broccoli then plunge in ice water to stop the cooking if I plan to use it in a salad. Not only does this improve the flavor, it brightens the color to a very pretty and palatable bright green."

SB identifies with two-years-ago Sue. Crisis averted; forge on. Edit cheese, blanche broccoli.

End of published clues in NY Times. Leg up: Already know what "quinoa" is, and even how to pronounce it (KEEN-wah). This forecasts streamlined efficiency finding it at the grocery store, as it eliminates blank-faced employees staring at you as you plead for the location of "kwin-oh-ah." Also, already know what "zest of the lemon" means. And the decision to substitute salt for things like "Kosher salt" and "sea salt" and "pink salt" is already a standing policy. On the other hand: pro'ly gonna hafta figure out what "toasted" means with respect to pecans. I would not know a toasted pecan from a cockroach carcass.

SB actual Prep Time and result

Google what the hell "parboiled" means: 4 minutes. Attempt to guess what "briefly" means in respect to parboiling, before giving up: 1 minute. Total: 5 minutes

Decide to give up on "toasted pecans" question and just settle for pecans: 0 minutes

Drive to Wegman's (nearest good grocery store): 30 minutes

Wander around semi-lost, intermittently waylaying swiftly passing employees for help while slowly gathering ingredients. Add checkout time, including long wait for stout but energetic woman to bag own groceries for family of 16, and game, but lame, joke, which does not bestir vaguely cute young checkout girl with her brain on "idle" from her torpor: 30 minutes

Drive home: an unpleasant 30 minutes, fighting drowsiness. Did you know sleepiness behind the wheel is as dangerous as drunkenness?

Meditate on phrase "season aggressively with salt": ongoing (still—I mean, till right now). End up amusing self but scaring dog.

"Peel the stem of the broccoli"? YouTube, 10 minutes, and got flustered in the process, which I shouldn't have, but I'm tired.

Finding second large pot in which to parboil broccoli, used to "plunge in icewater" as per Sue, except my icemaker hasn't worked since 2016 and I forgot to buy ice at the store, so we go with cold water from the tap: 5 minutes

Inscrutable sentence: "Taste and add more salt, pepper and lemon juice, as needed. Store, refrigerated, for up to 3 days." They say that as if "taste" and "add more salt, pepper, and lemon juice as needed," are connected; not for me. I don't know how anything is supposed to taste. In fact, I taste poorly; I mean my taste buds and their connection to my brain don't physically work very well. I also come to and realize, after a momentary brain freeze-up, that "storing refrigerated for up to 3 days" is not part of the recipe, but that I can probably eat some of the salad right after it's finished; it means to store whatever you don't eat. Think to self (which is how I think): maybe your brain is kinda on idle, too, smartass.

Conclude preparation of salad + cleanup: 20 minutes

Total prep time: 2 hours, 10 minutes (433.333% of published estimate)

Cost: $37 (including gasoline a.k.a. petrol)

Wastage: most of a jar of Dijon mustard which I do not need and will never use again, most of a container of honey in a plastic container shaped like a bear, most of a bag of dried cranberries, almost all of a bottle of apple cider vinegar which will sit in the door of the fridge for the next 9 years, because, in a flurry of food safety virtuousness, I threw away the one which had been there for the last 9 years and bought a new one for this project. On the good side, SB will actually likely consume the leftover half lemon, pecans, and quinoa. And actually, dried cranberries taste pretty good in salads.

Result: Won't really like it. But it'll be okay. Looks like a mix they used to sell at the deli counter called "Detox Salad" which was hastily discontinued right after the deli counter employees detected that I liked it. Other things that have been discontinued just recently (unlike some of the above, this is all totally 100% true): the food my dog has been eating since we moved here in 2015; the one salad dressing I've ever found that I actually like, and had been buying for years and years; my favorite soap; and the packaged TastyBite "Spinach Dal" I used to eat with rice and chickpeas at least once a week. Discontinuation is the downside of packaged food: everything you find that you like will one day abruptly vanish forever, leaving you adrift and rudderless. The discontinuation of my salad dressing is actually more of a crisis, albeit a tiny one, than I can appropriately convey in words. I try not to eat candy, but I still mourn the discontinuation of my favorite-ever candy 30 years ago now; I will never taste it again from now until I shuffle off to Buffalo, and that saddens me with a now-calcified forever sort of sadness.

Remaining question: Will sad-sack SB eat the rest of the Quinoa and Broccoli Spoon Salad, flagrantly expensive in terms of time, dollars, mental energy, and self-endangerment, or will it reside in the refrigerator, sometimes referred to as "the Rotter," for the next four weeks or until it grows mold and we scrape it into the garbage?

Only time shall tell, only time shall tell.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dave G.: "A few random thoughts. The recipe you tried was just some raw and partially cooked veggies, in a Dijon mustard dressing. Don’t overthink this. Pick the fruits, veggies, seeds, nuts, and whatever other solid ingredients that you like, mix them together, and douse in dressing, also of your choice. Feel completely free to use commercial or homemade dressing, and salt, pepper and season to your taste. If mustard is not to your liking, there is no reason to put it in your dressing. Sneak up on the salt. It can always be added, but is impossible to remove.

"The parboil thing is just meant to tenderize and brighten the broccoli, without turning it mush. If you like it raw, that is fine too. Like everything else, texture is a personal preference.

"As for salt—Kosher does not equal table salt, although they are both sodium chloride, and neither are 'pink' salt, which until recently, has referred to either a combination of sodium nitrite + sodium chloride, or sodium nitrite + sodium nitrate + sodium chloride. That pink salt is used for curing meat (ham, bacon, corned beef, etc.) and making sausage, and has been falling out of favor due to health consequences if over-consumed. Today, pink salt may also refer to the mined salt from Pakistan with a pink hue due to trace elements. As for Kosher salt, the large flat grain makes it far less dense than common table salt. The flat grain sticks better to the surface of food, and I find myself using less of it.

"Your no-longer-made dressing note touched a nerve. I’m fond of 1000 Island dressing, but tend to avoid it, due to being high in fat and calorically dense. A few years back, Bolthouse started selling a Greek-yogurt-based 1000 Island that I thought was great. Of course, as soon as I was hooked, they pulled the plug and I haven’t found anything equivalent. However, a recent Googlefoo pointed me towards a couple recipes. Consider trying the equivalent exercise for your lost favorite. Likely someone has developed a clone.

"As for salads, I came to love traditional Greek salads, when traveling in Greece a couple of years back. Sliced cucumbers (I like the thin-skinned ‘hothouse’ type) and tomatoes, slivered red onion, fresh feta cheese (the stuff in brine), a couple tablespoons of good quality EVO, and a pinch of Kosher salt and oregano. For acid, you can either go with wine or apple vinegar, or my favorite, which is balsamic."

Mike replies: I've tried twice so far to make my own miso-ginger dressing. Pretty bad fails both times...they tasted nothing like Organicville's.

JimF: "I watch some cooking shows on PBS but never cook any of it. If you notice most recipes have 20 or more ingredients. On TV they are all pre-measured in cute little containers and dumped in in quick succession. Getting all the stuff out (if you have it), measuring it, and cleaning all those containers takes a lot of time. That's why sous-chef is a full time job."

Mike replies: That's funny. I started watching a video series called something like "Fifteen Minute Meals," and the idea was the same. The entire counter covered in pre-measured ingredients in various containers—minimum three dozen of them, quite possibly more—and when the timer started, the chef started whirling like a dervish, with complex timings, choreographed maneuvers, and specialized skills deployed left and right. Everything he needed was laid out strategically for him. He was cooking three separate complicated dishes concurrently. All the while, he kept up a patter about where the ingredients could be procured, one thing from an Asian grocery, another from a website, a third that he got directly from an organic farmer, etc. I estimated the prep, for me, at no less than a solid eight-hour day, at least an hour for cleanup, and the cooking—well, the cooking was beyond my abilities, full stop. Fifteen-minute meal my eye!

What I need is a remedial WFPB cookbook for clueless single non-cooks, starting with "Peanut-Butter Sandwich: Find a kind of bread with whole wheat as the first ingredient and two or less grams of sugar per slice. Find a brand of peanut butter that consists of only peanuts and no added sugar. Smear the peanut butter on the bread with a table knife." Then move on to recipe No. 2.

I'm only partly kidding.

Joe Kashi: "Talk about synchronicity! I opened today's post while eating the day-old remnants of that very same quinoa-broccoli salad. Actually, I like it, as did our two German Shepherds, who competed licking the bowl. We also eliminated the sharp cheddar and a lot of the salt but substituted skim-milk Italian Parmesan. I did wonder if perhaps adding some sharp cheddar might help the flavor."

James Weekes: "Sounds like you avoided a monumentally bland meal. You need to lay in some spices. I recommend Penzey's."

Mike replies: You'll laugh, but I really can't tell much difference between spices. Whenever I cook something I add spices because I know they're good for you (concentrated dried plants) but I don't really know what to add so I usually just pick a few at random and add what feels like a reasonable amount to the dish.

Ed Hawco: "Oh, Mike. In the software world we refer to people like you as an 'edge case' in that cooking and eating are not high on your list of interests or priorities. Most recipes are written on the assumption that the reader has a certain mid-level set of skills and corresponding experience and interest in the kitchen.

"That said, I will add that I have never seen a recipe that did not need a total re-write. I say this as someone who has been writing instructions professionally for more than than 30 years. Every online recipe I use gets sent into my recipe app ('Paprika'; highly recommended), where I can rewrite it to my liking, which I do 100% of the time. I often think I should give up on software and offer myself as a professional recipe re-writer, but there’s the small problem of needing to make a living.

"You did well substituting ice water with cold tap water—99.9% of recipes involving par-boiling of vegetables (referred to as 'blanching' by pros) call for an ice water bath, which is completely unnecessary. It’s one of those self-perpetuating tropes that started off in a professional kitchen where of course they have endless supplies of ice on hand at all times. They filter down to home cooking where the recipe writers (food bloggers in particular, who are the worst) just parrot the received wisdom without ever questioning it. I blanch vegetables all the time—broccoli in particular—and I never use ice water.

"Two other things for anyone else who might want to give this recipe a crack (or if you want to try again); generally one minute in the boiling water is sufficient for broccoli. Beyond that and you’re not blanching it; you’re cooking it. One minute gives you the cleaning you want, tender florets, crisp almost-raw stems, and a nice green color. Pro-tip: after draining, give each floret a flick to get some of the water out of the bushy part. It will stay good in the fridge (in a container) for a few days.

"Toasting nuts can be done in a toaster oven (keep an eye on it!) or in a dry medium-hot skillet, where you keep the nuts moving for a couple of minutes until they are a bit darker, smell nice, and are not burned. (Do not turn away from the pan!)"

Mike replies: It's actually high on my list of priorities to eat somewhat self-defensively, because I have had such poor food instincts all of my life. I have only partly succeeded. The problem, and you may quote me, is that WFPB (whole food plant-based) is a good diet, but not a very good menu.

Richard John Tugwell: "I find that following 'recipes' rarely leads anywhere useful. Learn how to prepare and cook food, make your own selection, adapt according to season, availablity and cost. Eat. Read good food writers, rather than recipes books. The best food writers are good at giving you ideas, rather than recipes. For example, Nigel Slater in the UK Guardian, or Claudia Roden. But detailed ingredients and instructions? Never worked for me."

Dave B: "I’m sorry if this is OT but this was the best post you have ever written. It (and the comments) took me half an hour to read thru my laughing and tear-drying. More of these and fewer on photography please. This is exactly what the world needs these days. Thank You!"

Mike replies: I'm glad you liked it!