If you ever see the words “easy,” “healthy” and “mozzarella sticks” in the same sentence, don’t trust what follows.
My challenge for this week was to attempt an online DIY project or recipe, and boy, was it more of a challenge than I expected. I’ve never really been much of a Pinterest user, but this assignment required a sign-up. Yeah, I know, I’m jumping on this bandwagon a little late.
However, just because I haven’t been a Pinterest frequenter before, this doesn’t mean I don’t know about all the “super simple” projects that turn out to be way more trouble than they’re worth. I’ve seen those Pinterest fail videos and the articles about how someone tried to live like Pinterest for a week and it was nearly impossible. All those colorful pins of cool projects and yummy foods made me forget this.
For the Wildcat’s first DIY challenge blog, I wanted to find a recipe that a busy college student could find time for. I wanted something with ingredients that could be found at the grocery store around the corner. I wanted something that could be made in a reasonable amount of time. I wanted something that didn’t have billion calories. So, when I came across a pin titled, “Skinny Mozzarella Sticks - Simple, Quick, Delicious,” I thought I had found the perfect recipe.
I was wrong.
The recipe was simple, with only five ingredients: olive oil, string cheese sticks, wonton wrappers, an egg and marinara sauce. I took a ride down to the Safeway near my house and picked up everything I needed but the wonton wrappers. The store didn’t have wonton wrappers but they did have spring roll wrappers, and after checking with my good friend, the Internet, I found out that for frying purposes the two basically do the same job.
Once I got home I started my epic cooking challenge. The recipe instructed me to:
- Whisk the egg and a little water together
- Cut the cheese sticks in half
- Spread the egg mix on the wonton/spring roll wrappers
- Wrap the cheese stick halves in the spring roll wrapper
- Fry them
Easy, right?
No.
Have you ever tried to roll an egg-covered spring roll wrapper around a cheese stick? It doesn’t work. When you make spring rolls, you have to soak the wrapper in water before you put veggies and meat inside of it so it doesn’t just snap in half when you roll it up. The egg mix was supposed to take the place of soaking it in water, but every single time I tried to roll the mozzarella inside the wrappers, they would just snap. It didn’t matter how much egg I put on it, it would always crack halfway through. Not only that, but these wrappers are like triple the size of the cheese sticks you’re wrapping them in, so once I attempted to roll them up, I had to fold in the sides to make weird, burrito-shaped mozzarella spring rolls.
Frying them was simple, as I just had to throw the olive oil in the pan and give the sticks a few minutes on each side to get crunchy. I really hoped that they would pleasantly surprise me. Unfortunately, I took one bite of these cheesy monstrosities and that hope went out the window. Not only were the layers of spring roll hard to bite into, the rolls had sucked up so much of the olive oil that I could taste it as much as the cheese, which didn’t seem very “skinny” to me. I was a little upset that I wasted the time, money and calories on it.
I know that some of my issues would’ve probably been solved by using wonton wrappers instead of spring roll wrappers, but I wanted this to be a realistic test for a college student. Someone juggling classes, work, relationships and their sanity isn’t going to have time to check four grocery stores for a certain kind of wrapper for their mozzarella sticks, so when I couldn’t find the right item I substituted it with something that should’ve worked just as well.
All I know is the next time I’m craving mozzarella sticks, I’ll be ordering them from the Italian place down the street.
Difficulty (out of 10): 6
Worth it? NO.
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