meal fourteen: chicken lettuce cups, chorizo clams, long beach coleslaw
Chris: We are almost exactly 3 months (25%) through our year-long journey of self discovery/loathing and I'm happy to report that after this meal we are almost exactly 25% through all the dishes we need to make. So we're on pace, which is really the one piece of good news I can give you.
It's a weird thing having this blog. I rarely tell people about it too, to be honest, because it's kind of embarrassing. More often a friend will tell someone else while we are all out together and I'll have to end up explaining it. I usually start with something like, "So you know that movie Julie and Julia where she had to cook all of Julia Child's recipes in one year? We're doing that with Guy Fieri's cookbook." The responses are varied. Usually it's just sort of a furrowed brow with a nod and they say "sounds interesting." Sometimes, someone will say something like "Oh, I didn't know you were such a huge Guy Fieri fan." And I'll have to be like "No, I'm just a sarcastic asshole who can't enjoy things unironically." One time someone said, "you should have picked a better chef, like Ina Garten or something." People who have found the blog via Facebook or something sometimes have a more positive reaction. The most common reaction I get is simply, "I read your blog." Which might be a true statement, but because they never add "and it's so funny" I can usually read between the lines.
We haven't really had much of a readership outside of our friends, as far as we can tell. We do get some random messages of support and random readers liking the page on Facebook or following our IG. A lot of friends and family of ours haven't read it, which is fine. I guess what I'm getting at is this motivation for this blog at this point is our own satisfaction/stubbornness. Writing this blog is an inherently self-indulgent act. I am really enjoying getting to spend a lot of time with my friend, after we lived in different parts of the country for the past five years. I'm enjoying cooking more, for the most part. And I like having a writing project. There are surprisingly other people that have started other similar blogs around the web, and they seem to have given up at around the 3-month mark. We're gonna keep pressing ahead and I hope you stick with us!
Allie: That was beautifully written and I agree with everything you said, Chris, except I think the people I talk to about this blog usually have stronger reactions about it (people have OPINIONS about Guy Fieri!!). Despite the fact that most of the food we cook has all the flavor, crunch and attitude of a Southwest boarding pass, it's been fun to force myself to cook foods I never cook on my own (mostly shrimp) (so much shrimp). I haven't told anyone I work with about this blog, and I have to say, I 100% understand why Batman keeps his identity a secret, because explaining something that's inherently pretty dumb (mixing ketchup with orange soda, dressing up like a bat) takes a lot of time and energy and there's so much NUANCE to cram in there and ultimately you just sound dumb and like you enjoy wasting money. Anyway, thanks for reading this blog! I am the batman now.
Chris: We first made chicken lettuce cups! This dish felt most like something you'd find at PF Chang's. Yea, I just googled it--they have this at PF Chang's. This recipe really highlighted something that drives me crazy about this cookbook. Guy clearly wrote this book with no regard for how people actually cook. This recipe had twenty-nine ingredients (29!!!) and a full ten of those were various Asian spices and sauces that were needed for 1 tablespoon or less and won't be needed again for the rest of the book. So if you want to make this at home you are going to be dropping $20+ on various sauces just to make this one dish. It's maddening! I will say, this came out pretty good. It felt like the least authentic Asian food I've ever eaten. Like if you got Panda Express at a Greyhound station in rural Kansas, it would probably taste like this. But it was pretty tasty and I think I'd make it again. Mostly because I now have $20 worth of Asian sauces in my cupboard and what else am I gonna use these for. Chris's rating: 4 out of 500 tablespoons of available sauces.
Allie: Piggybacking off of what Chris was saying: who is this cookbook for?? When we started this project, I would have said "Steve Harwell." Now, 25% into this cookbook, I have no idea. Some of the recipes make 2 servings and some of the recipes make 10 servings. Is this book for families who want to make quick, flavorful weeknight meals? Because most of these recipes require hundreds of ingredients, a cauldron, and a geologically significant chunk of time. Is it for people who want to be blown away by strong flavors and stretch their cooking skills? Because 90% of these recipes start with cooking onions in bacon grease and include no other herbs or spices. There's no overarching connection between any of these recipes, and there's really no theme to the book beyond "one time I ate chicken with Sammy Hagar".
Anyway, I have a soft spot for Americanized mall Chinese food, so I enjoyed these. We had to halve this recipe so we didn't end up with a flotilla of chicken lettuce cups, but we also tend to drink continuously while we cook so I forgot to halve the ingredients for the sauce and we ended up with twice as much sauce as we needed. (We have to halve or quarter or sixth the ingredients in all of these recipes and it's always like the scene in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon solves the equation in the hallway except we're usually both drunk and bad at math. Also we don't end up solving the equation. To answer your question, it's nothing like Good Will Hunting) Anyway, my inability to do math turned out to be fine because using twice the amount of sauce actually added a normal amount of flavor to the food. Also, Guy wanted us to fry up some wonton wrappers and crumble them into our lettuce cups and when I read that I threw the cookbook down the stairs and Chris let me skip that step. Allie's rating: 4 out of 5 Cajun equations, which is a Guy Fieri math textbook that also gives you indigestion
Chris: Next, we made this Rhode Island coleslaw and boy did it straight up suck. I actually think I participated 0% in the making of this but I ate a few bites afterwords and it was super bland. I don't even really like coleslaw that much when it's good, but this was bad coleslaw like you'd find in a Greyhound station in rural Kansas. I don't even have much to say about this except most of it ended up getting thrown away. Chris's rating: 1 out of 5.
P.S. I now know this is called Long Island Coleslaw. There was nothing "Long Island" about it, so it didn't really stick with me. I guess maybe he called it Long Island because like when you mix all the alcohols together to make a long island iced tea, it's supposed to taste good, but it doesn't, and this was just a bunch of crap mixed together that I assume was supposed to taste good, but did not.
P.P.S. It appears I was wrong again. It is Long Beach Coleslaw. The world is a dark place.
Allie: Thank you for the round-the-world coleslaw tour. The best part of making this was that one of the steps was basically "squeeze a whole bottle of blue cheese dressing into a bowl of lettuce" and I kept making eye contact with Chris while I was squeezing the dressing into the bowl and yelling "I'M COOKING". It was dumb, but so was this coleslaw. It tasted like the absence of flavor. If you were on the moon and took off your space helmet, the last gulp of non-atmosphere nothingness that you would be able to taste before you died would probably taste like this dumb coleslaw. Allie's rating: 1 out of 5 space deaths
Chris: Finally, we made chorizo clams. Allie and I went shopping at Jewel, which isn't the fanciest grocery store, but I was pleasantly surprised they had clams, and the clams were on sale. I told Allie I would pick out the clams, and she could go start with the rest of the list. You know the old slug lady who worked in the file room in Monsters, Inc? Yea, she was working behind the seafood counter at Jewel. I asked for 2 lbs of clams, which she slowly counted out one by one. About 3/4 of the way through she lost count and had to start again. It took so long that Allie finished the ENTIRE rest of the shopping list while I was standing in the clam line. What a ca-clamity.
I really like steamed clams! The broth of these clams were chorizo, garlic, a little bit of jalapeno, and some oil. I've only made clams myself in like a white wine sauce, so I was hoping these would be something different. I used to wait tables at a restaurant and one of the cooks there was Mexican and he used to make me jalapeno steamed clams which I loved and were super spicy and good. These were, SHOCKER, not as good. They weren't bad by any stretch, and I thoroughly enjoyed them, but the broth was pretty bland. Still, clams are rarely something I make for myself on a weeknight, so it was still a nice treat. What I like about making clams is they are alive in the fridge and they open and close and talk to you and say, "Chris, what are you doing with your life?" Chris's rating: 4.5 out of 5 ca-clamities.
Allie: I offhandedly said "clams are kind of weird" and Chris spent the whole night saying "are you afraid of the clams" and "are you afraid the clams are going to eat you" and "don't be afraid of the clams". It was annoying. Again, I don't really eat seafood so I had never cooked clams before but it was easier than I thought it would be. It's weird that we murdered a bunch of clams, right? I don't really remember these clams. They were fine. I liked the broth and I dipped my bread in it. My smoke detector has gone off three times since I started writing this paragraph even though there is NO fire here and I feel like it's a higher power trying to remind me of something about these clams. I am going to feel very dumb in heaven if there actually is a fire and it's not just God trying to remind me that these clams actually had a nice level of spice and flavor to them. Wait, did it work? Allie's rating: 3.5 out of 5 clam-tastrophes
Final Summary:
Total dishes made: 38/153
Worst sentence in one of these recipes: "Just imagine the scene--there's no electricity or running water, and everyone is just sitting around eating lettuce cups...Crazy!"
First sentence of the Wikipedia on Long Beach, CA: "The Port of Long Beach is the second busiest container port in the United States and is among the world's largest shipping ports. The city also maintains a progressively declining oil industry with minor wells located both directly beneath the city as well as offshore." OH NOW I SEE WHY HE CALLED IT LONG BEACH COLESLAW
Chris: If we were to stop this project right now, we'd get a 25%, which is an F. That seems about right.
Allie: Yeah but this blog is definitely going on our permanent record