Tampopo: The first noodle movie

After a long week (of mostly good busyness*, but much busyness none the less), the Mister and I relaxed by watching Tampopo last night. I'm sentimentally attached to Tampopo, as the Mister and I watched it together early in our courtship (so early that his loft apartment was clean when we viewed Tampopo together there), but I think that I can safely say that it's well worth watching for noodle lovers and those willing to laugh at a few of the absurdities of Japanese obsessions**. The movie is a string of food-related vignettes interspersed with a mock Western about the revitalization of a ramen shop. At times it is as silly as that sounds, but it doesn't take itself too seriously, even though the characters clearly take noodles very seriously.
Experience viewing Tampopo prepared me for reading Momofuku, David Chan and Peter Meehan's cookbook-memoir about noodle obsessions and starting the Momofuku empire in NYC, last January. The book was a present given to my parents, and I didn't try to cook anything from it, but both the Mister and I were mesmerized by the accounts of soba training and ramen training and flaunting convention as an up and coming chef.

Out of curiosity, has anyone seen Ramen Girl?

*Including being called on Thursday to find out if I wanted my institution included on an NSF grant somebody else is writing. If funded, we would receive money to hire students to do cool research that we would like to do anyway. While participating did require me to run around and acquire signatures and apologize for getting signatures without ample notice, that's all it required of me, and the guy writing the grant was genuinely surprised that I wanted to participate.

**Warning, the subtitles do make it a less good choice for a tired Friday night as one cannot knit to it or fall briefly asleep and catch back up.