Cable Dating

Dinner and a movie; an OK date, if not the most lavish imaginable. To do dinner and a movie even cheaper, you can watch the Friday night show of the same name that debuts tomorrow on cable channel TBS. It’s actually two movies combined with a comedy/cooking show hosted by Annabelle Gurwitch of “Not Necessarily the News” and former Dennis Miller writer Paul Gilmartin.

The recipes will be designed for the movies. For “The Breakfast Club,” it’s a “breakfast club sandwich” (cheese and sweet pepper frittata plus bacon and avocado; “while bread is toasting,” say the instructions, “take a few minutes to whine about anything that your parents ever did that might have stunted your emotional growth”). The Oct. 27 “Dinner and a Movie” will feature two vampire flicks, “The Lost Boys” and “At First Bite.” The recipe, not yet finalized, is likely to be “stake tartare.”

Pasta Thyme

There have been a lot of food newsletters, but few with as clear a focus as Pasta Press, “the newsletter for connoisseurs of flavored pasta--with a healthy twist.”

It was started by the Gluck family, who make fresh pasta incorporating flavorings like red pepper, lemon thyme r roasted garlic in the dough and sell it at farmers markets up and down the state. The newsletter came about, they say, because customers would eagerly buy pasta and then ask what the heck to do with it.

To their credit, the Glucks give away some of their dough recipes in this newsletter, and they provide recipes for using flavored pastas. The recipes tend to be big on vegetables and seafood and come from restaurant chefs and entrants in cooking contests conducted by the magazine as well as from the Glucks themselves.

This is a clear, attractive, no-nonsense publication with about eight recipes, and a bunch of basic cooking information, per quarterly issue. For a one-year subscription, send a check for $8 to Pasta Press, P.O. Box 3070, San Diego, CA 92163.

What Suds Go With This Grub? For too long, the oenophiles have had all the fun, rating their wines and suggesting the ideal foods to go with them while beer lovers merely drank their tipple of choice. “The Beer Lover’s Rating Guide,” by Bob Klein (Workman; $9.95), aims to change that.

The author gives tasting notes on 1,200 beers (his fourth-highest rating goes to one from Brazil). The suggested beer-food pairings are often quite detailed, but you might want to remember that porter goes with shellfish, veal and the lighter meats.

A Clipping Century

Take a moment for sober contemplation. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the promotional coupon, of which 6.2 billion were redeemed last year.