Inasmuch as authors are, by the act of creation, images of God, the idea of making a Buffy movie without Joss Whedon is blasphemy. Buffy was a character that sprang from the brain of Joss (rather like Athena from the side of Zeus) and into boot-kickin’ television glory only after she had been bought from Joss and mostly ruined by Hollywood in the original ‘92 feature film.

Even if you were to leave Joss, Buffy, and the idiot Hollywoodians out of it entirely, I can’t think of a much worse thing you could do to the show’s extremely loyal fans. Buffy has a still-growing fan base, years after its cancellation. A fan base which organizes Meetup groups, holds Buffy-watching marathons, or swamps theaters with hundreds of people descending for a showing of the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling. The fans dress up for cons, dish out for DVDs, and run exhaustive blogs documenting Joss’ every move. Yes, maybe you could draw new fans with a new Joss-less vision — but not without alienating the existing ones, and why on earth would you want to do that?

Imagine if, in a world with no existing Batman comics, Frank Miller had written Batman Begins,* and pitched it to the studios. They bought the idea, but then twisted his script and dumbed it down to campy Adam West Batman. Then they poured the shattered wreckage back into the original author’s hands and said, “Okay, I guess you can do a TV show with this, if you want.” With freedom, Frank had gone on to create his vision of the Dark Knight through seven glorious years of television. (Sure, some years of Buffy were more glorious than others… nonetheless, the show was, overall, great.)

Now it’s like those producers are saying, “Ooh, okay, we’re gonna make another Batman movie — but we don’t want Frank or his vision involved; we want Adam West back.”

We’ve had the Dark Knight for seven years. Adam West was fun, and we laugh at him… but why would we ever, ever want to regress there?

* Yeah, I know Miller didn’t write the movie, but he did write Year One, which is most of where the movie got its meat from the comic books.

When I was about 10, following a Lent during which my whole family had given up all meat, I announced that I would not be eating meat anymore. My parents supported me in this, so long as I was nutritionally aware and conscientious about my eating habits, and I became completely vegetarian for about ten years. After waning resolve, though, and the desire for more culinary variety and better diet choices, I have embraced seafood. I still won’t eat red meat or poultry, although my concerns at this point are less for the fuzzy widdle animals, and more for the tons of grain that support them to get all fattened — it does not seem that relying on cows, for example, as a food source is really sustainable and responsible.

All that said, once I’d gotten past the initial barrier or eating seafood again (oh, sushi! How I love thee), I’ve started cooking it again. (Yes, I was cooking seafood before I was 10.)

In recent weeks I’ve subjected my parents to several seafood experiments. The first was this crab, avocado, and lime tower from La Tartine Gourmande. After making this from her recipe, I think that I’d cut back a bit on both the lime and the amount of avocado used so that the crab could really shine a bit more — but all the same, it was amazingly delicious. Also, I don’t believe I’ve ever before made a food that could be classified as a “tower,” so I was surprised and delighted that it held together properly and didn’t go all Pisa on me. My crab tower is significantly less gorgeous than hers, but I will accept that that is why I am the amateur and she is the professional. The Dungeness crab (which we got fresh at Whole Foods) was pretty much as sweet and perfect as crab can be, and played well against the tart lime and creamy avocados. Pictured to the side of the crab tower (or crab flower in my case, I think) here are a couple of stuffed mushrooms I made — I pretty much mixed up diced onions, garlic, the mushroom stems, and a little salt and olive oil and popped them in the mushrooms to bake for about ten minutes. VERY simple, and nom-nommy.

The other (rather more adventurous) dish that I made recently was a baked salmon and mussel dish of Spanish origin. I got the original recipe from “Food of Spain: a Journey for Food Lovers,” but I changed it up a little bit; for one thing, I did away with the clams (I was intimidated enough by the mussels), and for another, I condensed the sauce a bit more than the cookbook indicated. I was glad that this was one I chose to cook at my parents’ house, because I’m not sure how I would have gotten away without cooking it in the Le Creuset pot I used. The cider itself didn’t flavor this dish so much as provide a base for the onions and salmon to come out, and to steam the mussels. I was sort of amazed when I cooked the mussels and, indeed, as the cookbook had said, they gently popped opened. It reminded me slightly of cheese racing as I watched them open one by one, and quietly mocked the runt of the bunch, which never really opened. (I threw it out. Apparently if they don’t open when you cook them, it means they were already dead, which means they could be rotten, which means you really don’t want to eat them.) The parsley made a big difference to this dish as well. Parsley’s used so often as a garnish, one starts to wonder what it really adds besides its pretty looks — but in some dishes, I’d say it’s entirely mandatory. This one came out with the full flavors of salmon and mussels, the onions mild and sweetened by the cider, and the bit of pepper adding a little bite to the proceedings.