meal one: dirty bird sketti, grilled romaine with blue cheese-bacon vinaigrette, garlic bread
Allie: Meal one got off to a rollicking start when we met up to cook dinner and realized that we hadn't planned what we were going to make and hadn't done any grocery shopping and didn't even have a website or anything. It was truly a spectacular culmination of months of planning. We selected these meals because they seemed fairly innocuous and easy to make. The highlight of my night was when the cashier at the supermarket asked, "do you want a wine bag?" and I said "no, I AM a wine bag!" and the cashier seemed genuinely delighted even though that made no sense. Also, it was a $4 bottle of wine. We didn't need a wine bag.
Chris: I think the cashier laughing at Allie's wine bag joke completely justified her move to Chicago. Flipping through the cookbook, we were struck by how few things I actually wanted to make. There are literally hundreds of dishes in here, and nothing really seemed particularly appetizing. I didn't expect this project to exactly lead to me cooking haute cuisine, but I thought the food would at least sound appetizing. Guy couldn't even give me that one.
We ended up settling on a sort of an Italian theme.
Allie: First, we made Jimmy's Favorite Garlic Bread. Jimmy is one of the producers on Guy's show and he loves this garlic bread so much, Guy named it after him. It seems weird and unfair that you could have something named after you just because you like it a lot, and not because you had a hand in its making. If that were the case, we would all be walking around saying, "Pass me those Allie's Favorite Oreos" and "can you please turn down Allie's Favorite Jesus Christ Superstar Original Broadway Soundtrack." This garlic bread was surprisingly good, even though it required mashing 2 sticks of warm butter into a bowl of mayonnaise. The sun-dried tomatoes were an unexpectedly tasty touch that cut the richness of the rest of the bread. Allie's score: 4 out of 5 bowls of mayonnaise
Chris: Allie left out the best/most horrifying part of this dish; Guy Fieri repeatedly refers to mayonnaise as "food lube" throughout his book. Yea, you can't unknow that.
I should also say that this was the first dish we ever made, and we already started cutting corners. The recipe called for the garlic to be roasted for an hour before being mixed with the mayo/butter. Maybe Guy Fieri has hours of free time to be spending roasting garlic to make garlic bread but we have places to be.
I thought this was pretty solid garlic bread. It wasn't the best garlic bread I ever had, but I mean, not a bad start by any stretch. I can see why it's Jimmy's favorite. Chris's Score: 3.5 out of 5 food lubes.
Allie: Then, we grilled up Guy's grilled romaine with blue cheese-bacon vinaigrette, because there's nothing more delicious and comforting than a piping hot salad. It's pretty easy to make - you saute some bacon and onion together, mix it with a balsamic reduction, and drizzle it over some grilled romaine lettuce. It was actually good! I thought the blue cheese was going to overpower everything else, but either the salad achieved a nice balance or we accidentally lucked out by buying the cheapest blue cheese they had at Jewel. Ultimately, while good, it was a little heavy for my taste; if I were making this as a side again I'd probably do half-sized portions. Allie's score: 3.5 out of 5 hot salads
Chris: I burned my hand grilling this salad. That's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever need to type, but I guess this is my life now.
I thought this was pretty good, but I think it would have been just as good if we didn't grill the actual leaves and just had warm bacon, blue cheese, lettuce and dressing. Chris's score: 3 out of 5 burned salad hands.
Allie, I guess this is as good a time to ask as any: should I be rating these dishes against real food, or on a sliding scale because they are in this Guy Fieri cook book.
Allie: I would say follow your heart, but we've already eaten a ton of bacon so far and it might be dangerous to put any more stress on your heart. I'm mostly judging the food compared to real food, with a slight curve to reflect my very low expectations.
Allie: Then we made something called "dirty bird sketti". I resent that phrase because I'm a grown-up, and because it's PASTA and PASTA doesn't need to be infantilized. This is a super weird dish, which I know because every person we served it to stared pensively at their bowl for a long time while they were eating. This dish involves cooking chicken in an aggressive blend of spices and then adding some marinara dipping sauce and bacon and spaghetti. The resulting dish isn't bad, it's just mysterious, and kind of bland. It's the National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets of pasta. Like all great dishes, this pasta is based on a song called "Dirty Bird." I don't regret making it, but I will never make it again. Allie's score: 2.5 out of 5 misspellings of the word 'spaghetti'
Chris: I admire Guy's restraint in not calling this dish, puhsketti.
I make my own marinara sauce a lot and it tends to be pretty bland unless you add some sort of depth: meat, garlic, anchovies: something. Guy's sauce recipe was mostly just canned tomatoes (and not even good ones). It ended up tasting like, yea, marinara dipping sauce you'd get with mozzarella sticks. I thought maybe after adding all the bacon, the heavily seasoned chicken, the garlic, the onions, etc it would be more flavorful. No dice. It ended up tasting kind of like skyline chili (kind of), but not good. Sort of sweet, pretty bland, nothing special.
After listening to that song, I think this dish fits it perfectly: they are both entirely unmemorable. But, my wife ate 3 bowls of it, so what do I know. Chris's score: 2.5 out of 5 sad hours I spent making this.
Final summary:
Total dishes made: 4/153 (we had to make Guy's tomato sauce for the DBS)
Worst sentence in one of these recipes: "Cookin', jammin' the tunes, and hangin' with friends and family, that's what I'm talkin' about."
Number of foods that should be named after songs called "Dirty Bird": zero
Chris: My biggest take away from these 3 recipes is that they were all pretty labor intensive, with lots of chopping and lots of steps. All together we were cooking for like 2.5 hours, and it didn't really add up to anything special. This is going to be a loooonnngg project.
Allie: I would rather drink a bowl of paint than ever have to say the word 'sketti' again.