Some friends came over tonight for our bi-weekly Foodie Films event… where we watched Babette’s Feast. This was a continuation of French fare as the movie highlighted some French cuisine. The movie won an academy award for Best Foreign Film, however after watching it, we weren’t really impressed with it. Perhaps it was because we watched the movie in English… when it may have been better to watch it in French with English subtitles.

Some movies can only be described as delicious. In Babette’s Feast, a woman flees the French civil war and lands in a small seacoast village in Denmark, where she comes to work for two spinsters, devout daughters of a puritan minister. After many years, Babette unexpectedly wins a lottery, and decides to create a real French dinner–which leads the sisters to fear for their souls. Joining them for the meal will be a Danish general who, as a young soldier, courted one of the sisters, but she turned him away because of her religion. The village elders all resolve not to enjoy the meal, but can their moral fiber resist the sensual pleasure of Babette’s cooking? Babette’s Feast deservedly won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This lovely movie is impeccably simple, yet its slender narrative contains a wealth of humor, melancholy, and hope. –Bret Fetzer / Amazon.com

For the event, we had a potluck of french inspired cuisine and lots of wine and cheese ( of course!). Here was our menu along with links to some recipes and some candid pics of us before and after the movie…