meal thirty-three: fieri spaghetti and meatballs, hunter's hero, gaucho steak with four-herb chimichurri
Chris: In preparation for Mission: Impossible 6-- Rogue Punctuation Initiative¿ , Allie and I have decided to rewatch all the Mission Impossibles. We were rewatching the first one, which was pretty good, and we realized there's very little connective tissue holding this series together. I think the only thing these movies have in common are: (1) Tom Cruise running (2) Ving Rhames (3) the theme song (4) the machine that makes your face into anyone else's face. [Allie: come for the critique of Guy Fieri food, stay for the incisive cultural commentary about a movie that came out in 1996!]
Allie and I tried to really phone it in this week and cut every corner so we could be done cooking early and we could work on some other projects we have going. So of course, this was all incredibly difficult and nothing went according to plan and we just kind of sat there staring over the side of the ship as our blog slow-motion crashed into a Fieri and Meatball iceberg. Much like Titanic, I'm also pretty sure at the end of this blog Allie will remove her mask and reveal that she was old lady Rose the whole time and drop the entire blog into the ocean! And she will win the Nobel peace prize for her actions.
Chris: First, we made Chim Chim Churi steak. I legitimately am not sure if that's what this dish is called or if that's the song from Mary Poppins. Either way, by the end I was hallucinating penguins. I started to buy the ingredients to make the chimichurri sauce, which included approximately every spice ever discovered and needed to marinate for approximately 2 months. Then, I came up with a clever ruse where I purchased STORE BOUGHT chimichurri and passed it off as my own. Before Allie arrived, I snuck the chumichurri into a separate bowl and destroyed the evidence! And then all I had to do was cook the steak. I eventually told Allie that it was store bought chimichurri when she complained it was bad. I thought it was good and it took me no effort. Allie called my ruse "a waste of time" and I countered that it was actually "an incredible waste of time." Anyway, this steak took five minutes to make and I liked it. Chris's rating: 4.5 out of 5 bad cockney accents
Allie: I assume this was called gaucho steak after the Steely Dan album because why not??? WE BUILT OUR OWN WORLD, BWAAAAAMP. Remember when Inception came out and everyone was like, what a motion picture THIS is, it makes perfect sense, we cannot get enough of watching these young men tumble around in a spinning ceiling box? By the way one of the weirdest things I've learned about Chris during this blog is that he doesn't like JGL and he REALLY doesn't like Ryan Gosling. He also once fed a turtle to a Coinstar machine to remind it "who's on top of the food chain". I thought the store-bought chimichurri sauce was a bit too vinegary for my taste, but the steak was cooked pretty well. However, it was marinated in tequila, just like FUCKING EVERYTHING GUY FIERI MAKES, which kind of made this steak taste like, I don't know, the quaalude-soaked bathroom carpet on Jimmy Buffett's sex yacht? I did not finish it. Allie's rating: 3 out of 5 wasting away a perfectly good steak in Margaritaville
Chris: Next we made meatballs. Allie, being the clever, jean-jacket-adorned genius that she is, realized that despite taking up two separate recipes and SIX (6!) pages of this god-forsaken cookbook, both Fieri Spaghetti and Meatballs and Hunter's Hero used the same balls. One just served them over pasta and one put them in a sandwich. We would basically only have to make one thing and then we would knock out two recipes and finally all our troubles would be gone and so would our student loans and we'd finally have rock-solid abs! Quick aside: one time Allie and I were in a Five Guys in college and you know how they let you decorate an index card with crayons and put it up on a bulletin board on the wall? Most say something like "I <3 Five Guys" or have a picture of a hamburger or something. But we found one that just "Spaghetti" on it, written in regular pen, by what appeared to be a five year old. It was one of the best things that ever happened to us and we laughed for like 20 minutes about it and then Allie decided to steal it. She snuck up and pulled it off the wall and when she flipped it over she noticed the kid had tried to write spaghetti previously but had spelled wrong as "spuhgetti" and crossed it out, which really took it into the stratosphere. I just love how much time and forethought he put into the dumb ugly card that had nothing to do with the actual restaurant he was in that only served burgers and fries. That card hung on Allie's fridge for YEARS.
Well, back to the balls. The main ingredient appeared to be wet bread, because we had to soak a bunch of cubes of sourdough bread in buttermilk and then mix them into the meat. That's fine, because on the hero, the second main ingredient was also wet bread, from the sandwich roll. The way the wet bread really complimented the wet bread was divine. The third main ingredient was Allie's hair, which inexplicably got mixed into these meatballs because she didn't even help cook them. She immediately sliced her hand open with a knife ("accidentally") and had to just sit on a stool and boss me around while I cooked by myself like a slightly more masculine Rosie from the Jetsons. The worst part about making these meatballs is that Guy thought they could be cooked entirely on the stove. Usually, meatballs are browned on the stove and then either finished by simmering in the sauce or baked in the oven. Guy decided that they could just be cooked on the stove which took an ETERNITY and they just all fell apart and turned into a crumbly mess that I hated. Eventually, I just finished them in the broiler. They tasted like wet bread. Chris's rating: 2.5 out of 5 delicious chunks of wet bread.
Allie: I truly did slice my finger open almost immediately and it's still healing a week later and what a blessing that was. Chris had to chop vegetables for the first time in maybe the whole blog and as he started to do so it became clear that he had never seen a vegetable before or even held a knife. He kept staring at his reflection and screeching and then he threw a bone into the air and it turned into a space shuttle. So even though the recipe called for the onion and red bell pepper to be minced, Chris chopped them up into big ol' bricks and some of the meatballs were just wet bread mashed around big chunks of red pepper. I just sat there bleeding from my hand as all my hair jumped into the meatball bowl and if memory serves it was also very smoky because every time we cook Guy Fieri food we turn Chris's kitchen into a giant Negroni. Anyway, these meatballs were pretty bland and dry and took forever to make, but on the other hand, now we have vanquished the infernal "For Kids" section of Guy Fieri's Necronomicon of a cookbook. Allie's rating: 3 out of 5 fingers I have injured during this blog
Final Summary
Total dishes made: 104/157
Worst sentence in one of these recipes: "How do you shuck corn?"
Alternative titles to Mission: Impossible if the sequels were about our blog: Meatball: Impossible, Digestion: Impossible, Happiness: Impossible
Allie: Chris recently texted me to ask if birds can eat garlic bread. Food for squawk.
Chris: Someone has to look out for the birds