Before going to PA for Thanksgiving Eve, Sara, Amy (oh and Sara’s friend Karin) went to see “Twilight” the movie. It was what it was – definitely much better than my expectations. I just watched it again this weekend with my mom and I liked it even better the second time around.  I think it helped to have moved beyond not accepting that the casting didn’t live up to my mind’s eye of the book characters.   I really liked the style of the filming and the color palette.  They definitely weren’t going for a Disney-like full color quality.  Of course they adjusted the plot points a bit but overall they stayed surprisingly close to the book.  Robert Pattinson, as Edward, was in fact pretty yummy but we caught a couple minutes of of him as Cedric in “The Goblet of Fire” on tv last night and he looks much better w/out white face paint and lipstick.  Too bad he dies in that one.

The baseball scene turned out really cool and the end credits really rocked.  Those were my favorite parts.  Sadly none of it was actually filmed in Forks or PA. Which was a bummer.  Forks the movie town was a cute little borough, definitely wet, but still cute which isn’t the real Forks, and the high school was this classic multi-story number you’d see, well I don’t know where you’d see it but not in Forks.  My mom even started laughing at that first shot of the school (and so did Amy and I the first time around). The brief scene in PA wasn’t at all like PA either.

Our PA (the REAL place) Thanksgiving was great as usual. 17 people counting Mr. Jonah-cakes who enjoyed his cauliflower and cheerios.

On Saturday Slanky and I ditched the kid and went out to dinner and a movie. We decided to try Bella Italia because we’ve never been there. You “Twilight” fans will note its reference in the book. We told ourselves we definitely weren’t going there because of the book but I think we were a little curious as to how much they’d play it up. The Peninsula in general has benefited a lot from the Meyer-mania. You can read about that here.  My mom told us that there were some block-wide celebrations happening at all the businesses down town next to the theater showing “Twilight” when it first opened and we saw this display at a clothing store a couple storefronts down from Bella Italia.

Dinner at Bella Italia far exceeded our expectations (Is this starting to sound familiar? I think at this point I should just stop having expectations because I’ve been wrong so many times lately!).  We started with a calamari appi (sautéed with olives, artichokes, tomatoes & roasted garlic on polenta) and it was perfect.  The sauce was good, calamari was fresh and cooked well, the artichokes worked surprisingly well and the olives and garlic didn’t overpower anything.  We wiped down the plate with our leftover bread. It was that good. We also shared a small Caesar salad and the croutons were house-made – crunchy on the outside with a little bit of buttery chewiness on the inside, totally good. Slanky had a mushroom ravioli (which I pointed out to him, was what “Bella” had, he didn’t remember) and I had a smoked salmon fettuccini.  I think Slanky enjoyed his and mine was great too.  I’ve had better versions of this dish in the past (my personal preference is with no tomatoes but this version had them) but this was nothing to complain about.  The salmon was locally smoked and delicious and they did not skimp on it.  The dish was so big that I took half of it home.   We had a good white wine but I can’t remember what that was.  Later we headed to the movie.  We saw “Quantum of Solace” which sucked.  I could say more about that but I won’t.  In hindsight I should have forced Slanky to see “Twilight” instead.