meal twenty-two: ginger carrot soup, pepper jack pretzels, malty strawman, guido's lomo saltado, grilled ketchup
Chris: Allie recently decided to make a spreadsheet that organizes all of Guy Fieri: Livin' it, Lovin' it, Puttin' bacon in it for some reason. She really did it up to the nines--color coding, different categories, breakdowns of ingredients. If she put this much detail and effort into the rest of her life, she'd be able to be a normal put-together person who doesn't cry in the tub while eating stale pop tarts and reading Golden Girls fan fiction. The result of all this organization is that we realized we are behind. Like really behind. Like still have to make over 400 sub cabinet appointments nine months into your term, behind. Because of that, we decided to cook a butt load of food, with no theme, rhyme, or reason. It's like we loaded up a Guy Fieri shotgun, put it in our mouth and pulled the trigger.
Allie: As I have already yelled at Chris, I am strongly anti-bath and I am also VERY capable of buying pop-tarts WELL before their expiration date. LIBEL AND SLANDER!
Chris: First we made some ginger carrot soup. We sauteed a bunch of stuff in a pan like carrots and onions and put them in a blender with vegetable stock and it made soup. I've been trying to make my life more like the movie Cocktail with Tom Cruise. If you haven't seen it, Tom Cruise plays a flair bartender who does crazy tricks while making cocktails. Basically I crank the cocktail soundtrack and do awesome tricks while making soup. It is going...ok. I think, at least, Allie knows what I'm talking about when I yell at her, "THIS IS JUST LIKE COCKTAIL!" This soup came out pretty good. It was kind of like a cocktail but instead of using rum we used vegetable stock and instead of being a mudslide it was soup. Chris's rating: 4 out of 5 kokomos.
Allie: I don't think I've ever seen Cocktail, and after listening to Chris talk about it for three weeks, I don't think he has, either. Even though this soup involved mixing spices into yogurt and then letting it sit in the fridge for a while, which is rapidly becoming the thing I like least about my life, this soup was actually pretty good. It had a nice autumnal flavor and it was easy to make. It's so normal and balanced that my current theory is that the cookbook's ghostwriter, or maybe a savvy child prankster, sneaked this recipe into the cookbook as a joke. Allie's rating: 4.5 out of 5 soup there it is
Chris: We also made pretzels. There's like a 5-page-long story in this cookbook about how Guy started a pretzel cart when he was a child. It was called the awesome pretzel cart. This story is incredibly detailed and incredibly pointless. It includes sales figures and startup costs from 1980. I can't complain too much because Guy has started a foundation and uses the pretzel carts to teach kids about starting businesses. Can't make fun of him for that. (Allie: We can't?! Maybe we should be teaching kids about more useful skills. Like TAKING DOWN ISIS)
These pretzels were delicious. They were also weird. I had to roll all this dough out and layer in cheese, and then roll it out again. I used a ruler to get the dimensions right, but they still came out odd. They were tasty, but they didn't really taste like pretzels. They were just baked, so they didn't have that hard, egg-y outside I associate with a pretzel. I also am mad at Guy, who gives step by step instructions in the recipe. He also gives a 15(!) panel photo guide of how to make the pretzels. AND IN BOTH, the last step is "make into a pretzel shape and bake." Maybe he could have removed one anecdote from his pretzel story and included a how to. Chris's rating: 4 out of 5 pretzels making me thirsty.
Allie: One of my favorite childhood memories is eating soft pretzels on the streets of Philadelphia, which is a pastime so beloved that Bruce Springsteen wrote a whole song about it. Those pretzels had it all: a hard exterior, lots of salt, a weird oblong shape that made them perfect for grabbing while running up and down the steps of the art museum. These pretzels had cheese, which was good, but they were pretty blond, and they tasted more like doughy breadsticks than pretzels to me. I mean, I wouldn't kick these pretzels out of bed for eating crackers, even though that's carbohydrate cannibalism, but I guess I was just expecting more from someone who fancies themselves a pretzel tycoon. Allie's rating: 2.5 out of 5 Rocky starts to pretzel-making
Chris: We also made Guido's lomo saltado. Look, I'll level with you. I don't think I helped with this AT ALL. I just know it was insane. There are french fries in it. It was like someone took an entire McDonald's value meal and chopped it up and put it over rice. Chris's rating: 3 out of 5 McDisasters.
Allie: This was... sour. I've never had lomo saltado before, so I'm grateful to Guy for helping me expand my cultural horizons, but the flavors in this were all over the place, and I did not enjoy them. If you're wondering what cooking Guy Fieri food tastes like, this is a good example: he took all of my favorite foods (meat, beer, fries) and somehow made them all taste terrible when they were combined together. You could use this cookbook to teach students about the second law of thermodynamics, because cooking this food is basically increasing culinary entropy. Anyway, like I said, this was sour and eating it made my mouth tired. Allie's rating: 2 out of 5 lomo saltad-no thank yous
Chris: We made the malty strawman which has to be one of the lamest recipes in the cookbook. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just vanilla ice cream, banana, strawberry and malt. That isn't a recipe from a major food personality; that's like a recipe you see on Buzzfeed's 10 Easy Recipes only 90s Kids Need to Cook because Baby Boomers Ruined the Economy. Chris's rating: 2.5 out of 5 malty strawman fallacies.
Allie: OK, this was actually called the "malty strawnana". DON'T ANTHROPOMORPHIZE MILKSHAKES. It was hard to find malt powder at the food store, because it's not 1955 anymore and no one is drinking malts down at the sock hop except for us, apparently. Once we found and bought a vat of malt powder, we made this and it tasted exactly like a smoothie and you know what? I'm gonna give Guy a win for this. It was a smoothie recipe and it made a smoothie that didn't make me question the laws of thermodynamics. Allie's rating: 4 out of 5 the malty strawnanas and the papas
Chris: Finally, we made grilled ketchup. I thought, as a society, we decided that ketchup from the store was fine. No one invites you over and says, "I made everything from scratch, including the ketchup." It's already one of the building blocks of food. Is Guy gonna have me start harvesting my own wheat? Is he gonna have me start slaughtering my own pigs? WHERE DOES IT END? And ok, if this was really tasty, I'd be like, fine, I'll make this as a special treat some time. But it was truly awful. I think it is my least favorite thing we have made for the blog so far. Basically, I had to grill onions, red pepper, and tomatoes and then put them in a blender. You may be thinking, "Is that all it takes to make ketchup? Just three ingredients? How simple! How elegant!" BUT NO. That is not all it takes to make ketchup. This didn't really resemble ketchup in any meaningful way. It was kind of pink and watery and tasted awful. It tasted like old bloody mary mix that had been left in the sun. I was so annoyed by this. I was annoyed that Guy would have the gall to put a ketchup recipe in his book and annoyed that his editor wouldn't bother checking if this even worked. I was annoyed I wasted perfectly good vegetables making this. I was annoyed that I lost ten minutes of my life cooking this. I WANT MY YOUTH BACK, GUY! Oh well, I would have probably wasted it anyway. Chris's rating: 0 out of 5. We have a new champion for worst recipe in the cookbook. I have a feeling it won't last long.
Allie: OK, for some reason, I thought that when this ketchup was done, it would resemble ketchup in some way. I thought it would be red and also pretty thick. You know, like ketchup. But as soon as we put the grilled tomatoes in the blender, I realized that there was no thickening agent anywhere in the recipe. This ketchup was like the Jersey shore: hot, sticky, and 95% water. I don't know why, but this recipe broke me. I was literally sobbing because I was laughing so hard at this dumb, gross ketchup. There's just no way on God's green earth that this bonkers recipe will ever produce anything that even vaguely resembles ketchup. Look, 2017 has been a pretty rough year. If I'm gonna get through it by laughing at ketchup then that's what I'm gonna do. Allie's rating: 1 out of 5. This was definitely the worst thing we've made so far but it gets 1 star for making me laugh
Final Summary
Total recipes made: 62/157
Worst Sentence in one of these Recipes: "Me: Sorry! You: Sorry for what? Me: Oh, sorry for turning you on to this...It's gonna have you on the quest for gourmet ketchup!"
Things I would prefer to homemade ketchup: artisinal toilet paper, a farm to table noogie, chef-inspired toothpaste flavors
Allie: It's also worth mentioning that Guy's pretzel origin story involved him going to a pretzel cart, realizing that pretzels taste good, and stealing the idea AND PRETZEL RECIPE from his rival, which is some very cold shit that is presented, in the cookbook, as heartwarming pretzel shenanigans
Chris: You're right, Allie. This cookbook is basically The Departed. I think we're all gonna die at the end.