Happy Movie Gifts, everyone! Got your movies watched? Ready to talk about it, for good or ill? Let’s go!

Eleven years ago pretty much as we speak, I was with three friends on what will forever be known to us as “The Great Dollhouse Road Trip of 2012.” The why doesn’t really matter, but we were on our way from Washington State to Los Angeles County to pick up the dollhouse my grandfather had made me when I was a child. On the way south, we stopped for gas in Gilroy, California. Now, as the only native Californian in the group, I had been peppering our trip with random details about the state; I know enough of them, after all. When we hit Gilroy, I informed my friends of two facts. One, it was where my father was born. And two, it was the Garlic Capital Of The World. My friends inhaled, and you could actually smell the garlic in the air.

Why bring this up? Because I was gifted two cooking shorts by Les Blank. The longer is “Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers,” approximately an hour about pure love of garlic—filmed in no small part in my dad’s native Gilroy, of course. It includes Werner Herzog, a butcher of bulls from bullfights, and a guy in a garlic-shaped hat. Also a guy who’s actually convinced a historical Chinese chef was secretly a vampire, because he bragged about never eating garlic or onion. The second was “Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of the Cajun and Creole Cooking of Louisiana,” which is pretty much what it says on the tin. With Paul Prudhomme, of course, because it was 1990.

As many of you know, I am getting into cookbook-writing. My love of novelty cookbooks is well established. Somehow, it took me four decades to realize that it was my destiny to write them myself. I can be slow on the uptake sometimes. But I’ve been cooking since I was a small child, and the love some of these people have for cooking resonates with me. On the other hand, it makes me eye askance the guy who says that, if you love something, you want to cook it exactly the same way every time. I make better macaroni and cheese than my mother because I can see how to improve even something I grew up loving.

I enjoyed both of these, but on the other hand, I’m not sure they’re more than just light entertainment to fill some time. I appreciated that Blank occasionally put lists of ingredients onscreen, in case you were wondering exactly what was going into that pot someone kept pouring wine into other than well over a bottle of red wine and of course garlic, but if you actually want to reproduce the recipe, you’re on your own. And it’s only some of the dishes; more often than not, he doesn’t even tell you what they actually are. I assume one of them is garlic soup of some kind, but only because I’ve recently gotten into Anti-Chef on YouTube, and he made garlic soup once.

One assumes the Werner Herzog clip came because he was in the same place at the same time as Werner Herzog and, hey, wouldn’t you? He was filming “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” at the same time (yes, I’ve seen it—and remember Werner uses garlic to cook the shoe), and why not get a brief clip for his garlic documentary at the same time? It’s efficient, if nothing else. And if you really like garlic, or are interested in Cajun people complaining about how no one understands their culture while at the same time not understanding why you’d use a cookbook, there are worse ways to kill an hour and a half than to watch the pair of them. There are even worse ways on the Criterion Channel.

So? What did you watch, and what did you think?