Seven Days in Utopia: Lost Maples Eggs, Home Fries and Sausage Patty Recipe 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁
/Year Released: 2011
Directed by: Matt Russell
Starring: Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, Melissa Leo
(G, 98 min.)
Genre: Drama, Sports Film
Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” –Isaiah 30:21
Luke Chisolm thought his career was over until his life took a detour.
This film is too sweet for nihilistic Hollywood and earns the practiced disdain of uppity film critics who called it “down-home hokum,” full of “Christian bromides,” a “recipe for boredom,” or a “virtuous hack job,” to name a few of the anti-religious cliches that are fodder for most of Hollywood today. No wonder the box office has sunk to such depths lately.
Well, forget them and listen to Different Drummer, who calls them as she sees them. This a fine film, and Oscar winner Robert Duvall and Lucas Black (11 years old in 1996’s Swing Blade and 6 years away from his lovable roll as Agent LaSallee in NCIS New Orelans {2014 – 2019}) are terrific together.
This summary gets us started:
After a disastrous debut on the pro circuit, a young golfer finds himself unexpectedly stranded in Utopia, Texas and welcomed by an eccentric rancher.
Luke Chisolm ((Lucas Black) meets the off the grid eccentric Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall) accidentally when he sees a huge bull blocking a country road and careens through Crawford’s fence.
Crawford rides up on horseback and seems content in the little West Texas town of 375. (He corrects the sign that says 373, adding the twins born last week)
At first Duvall seems as corny and homespun as he wasn’t in 1979’s The Great Santini, certainly not the upbeat womanizer in Emmy winning 1989’s Lonesome Dove, and seeming to have little in common with Duvall’s Oscar winning role in 1983’s Tender Mercies.
Actually, as we and burned-out golfer Luke begin to find out, Duvall’s Johnny Crawford actually has something in common with at least two of those characters.
And in some sense, he recalls his role in The Godfather as the consigliere, where he is “logical, gentle, and serves as the voice of reason within the family.”
***
“Spend seven days in Utopia and you’ll find your game,” Johnny Crawford promises. But that seems as unreal as the etymology of Utopia, which literally means in ancient Greek, “a place that doesn’t exist.”
Crawford teaches Luke about the game of golf mostly by not playing it, instead forcing the chagrinned golfer to paint pictures of where his ball is going, and then the power of “SFT: You have to see it, feel it, trust it,” Crawford drills into Luke’s head.”
By the way, many critics have scorned these techniques, Bob Hoover of the Pittsburgh Post Gasette condemming “the nonsense that golf is a metaphor for life. No, it's a metaphor for golf.”
I guess Bob has never read the highly acclaimed The Inner Game of Tennis (1974) and all its lucrative spin offs.
Other eccentric teaching methods have Luke fly fishing and then actually flying Crawford’s single engine plane, where he teaches Luke what panic looks like and how to take someone “out of his game” to defeat.
A very good film, with an ending as far out and down home as the teaching techniques. Let it light up your life today.
–Kathy Borich
🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁
Trailer
Film-Loving Foodie
Poor Luke gets interrupted during his breakfast at the Utopia diner, but we can help him out here, by setting up a plate from the Lost Maples Café in Utopia, where several scenes were filmed.
It is also where the good-looking redhead waitress works, the one who teaches him some other important life lesson, such as catching lightning bugs and observing that their lights go off when they are trapped in a bottle.
Here is the meal he started to eat at the café, Lost Maples Eggs, Home Fries and Sausage Patties.
Lost Maples Eggs, Home Fries and Sausage Patties.
Ingredients
Home fries
· 2 cups Potatoes peeled and diced
· 1/2 tsp Garlic powder
· 1/2 tsp Onion powder
· ¼ tsp Paprika
· 2 TBSP Extra-virgin olive oil
Seasoning
· Salt to taste
· Black pepper to taste
Sausage
· 4 Breakfast sausage patties
Toast with jam
· 2 slices Your choice of bread
· 2 TBSP Butter
· 2 TBSP Your choice of jam or preserves
Eggs
· Butter or cooking oil
· 4 Eggs
Orange juice
· 16 oz Orange juice
Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
2. While the oven is preheating, wash, peel, and dice the potatoes.
3. Toss potatoes on a baking sheet with garlic powder, onion powder, and paprika. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Toss to coat evenly.
4. Spread the potatoes out in a single layer on the baking sheet. Roast in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy, flipping halfway through.
5. Heat a skillet over medium heat. Cook the sausage on both sides to an internal temperature of 160F (71C).
6. Toast the bread slices until golden brown.
7. Spread butter on the toasted bread slices and top with jam.
8. Add butter or cooking oil to a skillet over medium heat. Crack the eggs into the hot skillet and cook the eggs as desired (i.e. scrambled, fried, sunny side up). Season with salt and pepper.
9. Serve the eggs with home fries, sausage, and toast with jam. Enjoy with orange juice.
