meal five: ginger pork potstickers, waka waka salad

Allie: Chris and I finally decided to expand our Guy Fieri cuisine from "vaguely Italian" to "vaguely Asian". Have you ever been to P.F. Chang's and thought, this food is pretty good, but I wish I could have spent a very long time making this instead of having a nice person bring it to me in a reasonable amount of time? I think you know where I'm going with this.

Chris: Allie and I were texting earlier this week about when we were going to do our next meal. And I told Allie something along the lines of "can we cook early, because I don't want this to ruin my entire Saturday." So of course, we procrastinated, couldn't pick a recipe we wanted to make, and ended up cooking all evening. Another perfectly good Saturday ruined by Guy Fieri. 

Allie: First, we made something called Waka Waka Salad. Whenever I have to say that phrase to another grown person, my face curls up in disgust, just like my roommate's cat does when I sing "I will never be cat-isfied" (from "Cat-ilton") at her. This recipe is preceded by the longest two paragraphs you've ever read about the time Guy's mom made him a salad, and he didn't think he would like it, and then he did, but then he forgot to name it, and then he made up a name for it, and it was "Waka Waka Salad". Reading the stories behind Guy's recipes is like listening to someone describe the plot of a Seinfeld episode in graphic detail, but without any of the jokes, so it's just a story where nothing really happens and everyone involved in it sounds like a terrible person.

This salad is crazy. It involves crumbling three packets of uncooked ramen noodles over the salad, which is essentially coleslaw in a vinaigrette that's piled high atop a small mountain of homemade fried wonton crisps. Crumbling uncooked ramen over a salad is one of those ingredients that makes you say "hmm... this might just be crazy enough to work!" But I didn't think it worked all that great, and crumbling the ramen noodles hurt my delicate baby hands. Allie's rating: 3 out of 5 realizations that eating a salad covered in uncooked noodles doesn't even faze me anymore, I have become comfortably numb, etc.

Chris: I think this salad (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense. Like calling Jason Lee an "actor" and not "guy who yells at cartoon chipmunks professionally") is truly representative of what I thought the recipes in this project would be like. Just a bunch of fried shit, with crumbled up garbage food on top. Foolishly, I got my hopes up for this dumb salad. Like I fried up the wontons, and put salt on them and they were pretty delicious, and I too was like, "this salad may be crazy enough to work!" But it wasn't crazy enough to work. It was just normal, everyday, homeless guy singing The Flintstones theme with his hands in his pants on the subway, crazy. I had to chop like every type of cabbage ever made. There were like six types of cabbage we had to buy. And then we dumped them on what is essentially Asian tortilla chips and added uncooked dorm food on top. But you know what? In the end, this salad wasn't terrible. It wasn't good, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. Chris's rating: 2.5 out of 5 Asian tortilla chips.

Allie: We also made Guy's ginger pork potstickers. I love potstickers! I eat them all the time, because they're little delicious little meat purses and I don't see why I should ever have to eat anything else. (I live in a state of permanent scurvy, like a pirate, but one who can't actually go in the water because I get seasick when it rains too hard.) Anyway, I was excited to make these, because I figured it would be kind of hard for even Guy to mess up basic potstickers, and I was right. Well, I should say that Chris and I almost messed these up, because we got square wonton wrappers and the recipe called for round ones, but instead of coping like normal people, we just kind of smushed everything together and then Chris got mad at me when some of the potstickers opened in the boiling water and then we had hot cloudy pork water and we were both sweating and grouchy. Anyway, these were pretty good. I wanted some more spice in them but everyone shouted me down when I said that so I just ate them in silence while we watched Inception without the sound on for some reason. Cooking this food is so weirdly exhausting. Allie's rating: 4 out of 5 small blessings that this recipe doesn't have a terrible name

Chris: I'm watching Mulan on TV while writing this. Is that racist? I don't even know anymore. I'd never made potstickers before and actually kind of enjoyed making these! Allie described the process as "sweaty and grouchy" which I think was the original name my parents had on my birth certificate ("Unclaimed Sweaty and Grouchy Boy"). But yea, these are really labor intensive and standing over a pot of boiling water making these was a super frustrating time. Thanks, Guy! 

This being my first time making potstickers, I wondered silently to myself, "do potstickers stick to the pot? Is that why they are called potstickers?" At the end of the night I learned that, yea, they stick to the pot. It was kind of life-affirming, but also kind of ruined my pot and now there's brown gunk stuck on there I can't get off. Maybe that's representative of what I thought this project would be like.

And, I really liked these! Allie was being a total potsticker snob and was like "In Davis, they have the best potstickers that are not made by a white-haired, anthropomorphic croc." But as someone who likes potstickers a normal amount, I thought these were tasty and I'd maybe even make them again. I mean probably not, but maybe. Chris's rating: 4.5 out of 5 sweaty grumps.

Allie: Apparently saying "there is a restaurant with dumplings that I like" makes me a "potsticker snob" but IT WAS JUST SMALL TALK CHRIS AND BY THE WAY I THOUGHT JASON LEE WAS GOOD IN ALMOST FAMOUS LEAVE HIM ALONE

Final summary:

Total recipes made: 13?/153? Can we do a recount? How could we only be at 13 dishes? It has been an eternity.

Worst sentence in one of these recipes: [just because it's so needlessly detailed and pointless] "Long before I was on Food Network, I helped a Japanese restaurant owner with her business, and she wanted to pay me. I told her I didn't want money, but that I'd like to learn firsthand how to make some traditional Japanese dishes. She said she didn't know because she was raised in the States, but she introduced me to a friend who did. Her friend, who spoke very limited English, came over and we proceeded to make potstickers together."

Movie that I always forget Jason Lee is in: The Incredibles!

Allie: In my mind, Shakira wrote her waka waka song about this salad, and I will continue to believe that until she herself tells me otherwise.

Chris: This time for Africa. Take that Africa. You complained about being hungry, now you have to eat ramen noodles crumbled over chips.