meal six: asian fried quinoa "c. r. bipim delight," firecracker wings
Chris: Well, it took six meals, folks, but it finally happened. Allie and I literally ate garbage.
When we were shopping for the Waka Waka salad, and buying every cabbage known to man, we realized we also needed cabbage for this quinoa thing. We're planning ahead! But after the arduous process of making potstickers (and the resulting sweaty/grouchy frustration) Allie held up half a head of cabbage and said "Are you and Becca gonna eat this?" And of course I said, "HELL NO!" Because I'm a normal person who doesn't just go around eating half a head of cabbage like an apple and also I ignore all those things you post on Facebook about how wasting food is destroying the planet. So Allie pitched the cabbage into the garbage. Like five minutes later I realized our mistake, and I saw two paths in front of me: one involved going back to the store and buying more cabbage and one involved taking cabbage out of the trash. As my dignity has already been completely stripped from me, I chose the latter. And you know what? I stand by that choice. I'm already a garbage person, making garbage food, on a garbage blog. Why not just start eating garbage?!
The beautiful presentation of this dish really sets it apart
Sticking with our Asian theme, we decided to make Firecracker Wings and Asian Fried Quinoa "C.R. Bipim Delight." First, the quinoa. Look. I know how stupid the name is, but I just can't deal with it right now. Allie, please handle it.
Allie: Got it. First of all, I think it's important to note that Chris wrote that paragraph on his birthday, which is very sad. Back in Classical Greece, if you turned 28, that meant that you were probably nearing the end of a meaningful, prosperous life filled with participating in lengthy philosophical discussions, painting clay jars, and watching homoerotic Olympics. Now if you turn 28, it means that you're probably spending a lot of time writing gimmicky blogs and reading the Wikipedia pages for "life expectancy" and "Classical Greece." Anyway, this quinoa has a weird name, because it's named after Guy's sister, whose nickname is "C. R. Bipim Delight." Look, no judgment here. I love nicknames. My nickname throughout all of middle school was Jim, for some reason! But the very essence of a nickname is that it is shorter than the person's actual name, and the only way "C. R. Bipim Delight" is an appropriate nickname is if your real name is "Charles Reilly Bipimowitz Delightington" and the only way I can see this scenario playing out is if someone from Narnia came over to America and they shortened their magical name at Ellis Island. To summarize: this is a wacky name for a dish.
Chris: This was essentially fried rice that subbed in quinoa. According to Guy, we were supposed to lightly toast the quinoa in a cast iron skillet before boiling it, but something emboldened me to say "NOT TODAY GUY!" Perhaps it was the fact that I had resigned myself to eating literal garbage. Perhaps it was the half bottle of wine I had recently drank. But Allie and I just put that quinoa in a rice cooker. I don't want to compare my plight to that of Rosa Parks, but we are basically Rosa Parks and have suffered just as much by having to do this blog, and we finally said ENOUGH. Anyway, we also had to cut like a hundred vegetables and add them into the quinoa in a certain order which we screwed up 7 or 8 times, and then we put eggs in it. Despite all of our shortcuts, I kind of liked this. Really I did. Barely even tasted like garbage. Chris's Rating: 4 out of 5 pieces of literal garbage.
Allie: Guy talks a big game about FLAVOR and FLAVORTOWN and you'd kind of expect everything he makes to be just a massive dickpunch of flavor, right? But the only seasoning for this quinoa - which is basically just a cabbage-heavy stir-fry - is three tablespoons of soy sauce. And that's exactly what it tastes like: vegetables and quinoa with some soy sauce on it. Chris loved this, and he especially loved that we added an egg to it. He kept saying "the egg makes the dish!" just like I used to say "bandanas will never go out of style!" but, in the end, I thought that this was just kind of a bland dish. Allie's Rating: 3 out of 5 cabbage trash lids (...that's a pun on the phrase 'cabbage patch kids' but I didn't think anyone would get it if I didn't clarify that)
Chris: We also made firecracker wings. The sauce was sort of Asian. These wings started with Allie and I buying the cheapest chicken they had at the supermarket. As Papa Guy's slogan goes "Terrible Ingredients. Terrible Pizza. Papa Guy's." Also, we didn't make pizza we made wings. Also I'm losing my mind. I was kind of sort of looking forward to cooking these wings (I should stop doing that) because I love wings and I've never really found a perfect wing recipe. And for a brief fleeting moment I thought "These could be it." But they were not "it," reader. They were not. These wings were just kind of there. The marinade was pretty thin, and super sweet, like some sort of brown Kool Aid. I followed Guy's cooking instructions exactly, and they were still under cooked. And I mean, they weren't terrible. They just weren't good. And my expectations were too high. I should have remembered the slogan of this blog: "Lower your Expectations." Chris's rating: 2 out of 5 cups of brown Kool Aid.
Allie: Chris kind of glossed over the fact that these wings were undercooked, which is like writing a review of your stay at the Overlook Hotel and only focusing on the design of the carpet and not all the ghosts who tried to murder you. We ate a bunch of these wings and then finally decided to grill them a little bit longer so they'd be fully cooked, but we definitely ate some chicken that was still pretty pink. In olden times, this probably would have killed us, but luckily we had boosted our immune systems earlier that night by eating vegetables out of the trash. I also thought the marinade was sweet, but I kind of liked it; I don't usually make wings, or other foods that come in buckets, so I don't think I'll ever make these again, but I'd certainly eat them again. Allie's rating: 3 out of 5 the Shin-wings (that's a pun on the phrase "The Shining" which I mentioned earlier in this paragraph! You're welcome)
Final Summary:
Total recipes made: 15/153
Worst sentence in one of these recipes: "A lot of the healthy dishes in my repertory have stemmed from cooking for my sister, Morgan (C.R. Bipim Delight is my nickname for her). She's been vegetarian as long as I can remember, and I'm not a fan of just handling someone some steamed broccoli while I go eat turkey and all the fixins."
Chris: I am become garbage, destroyer of worlds.
Allie: But seriously why didn't those Narnia kids have to go through customs on both sides of the wardrobe those books are so unrealistic