“I could wake up on the same day a thousand times, and every single one would be different because of you. Every single one would be life-changing. Because of you.”
― Rachel Lynn Solomon, See You Yesterday
This week’s theme was Sticky, but rather than choose a food that’s sticky (honey, caramel, taffy, etc), I made a stick-y meal, aka a meal out of sticks: Mozzarella sticks, which I’ve wanted to make for some time, for two reasons:
They are one of my fiance’s favorite appetizers. Until I met my fiance, I’d never eaten a fried mozzarella stick. I’m not a big fan of string cheese, and fried string cheese wasn’t something I wanted to eat an entire basket of. But my fiance loves them, so if he orders a basket for the table, I’ll eat one or two, which is enough for me to enjoy the cheese pull and the crispy crust, and he can have the rest. It’s one of the many reasons we work so well together.
Rachel Lynn Solomon’s novel, See You Yesterday uses mozzarella sticks to explain a sticky alternate universe situation, which I thought was brilliant. As soon as I read it, I knew mozzarella sticks were going to be one of my bookish meals.
The book
I loved See You Yesterday so much. The Groundhog Day plot drew me in, and the chemistry between the main characters kept me reading until the end. Barrett Bloom is convinced college is going to change her life and she’ll be able to leave all the pain from high school behind— until she gets stuck in a time loop on her first day of classes. And the only person stuck with her — Miles, a physics nerd — doesn’t seem to like her very much.
Barrett and Miles do all the usual Groundhog Day things—getting tattoos, spending all their money on puppies and ice cream, doing good deeds to try to break the loop, getting revenge on those who hurt them. But ultimately, what breaks the loop is having the courage to move forward, literally and figuratively. I liked that.
Read if you like heroines who aren’t afraid speak their mind, slow burn romances between two nerds, and Groundhog Day, of course.
The food
Mozzarella sticks play a key role in explaining time travel and multiple universes in the novel (Like fried cheese, it’s weird, but it works).
To make my own mozzarella sticks, I used this recipe. Three important points:
— Double-battering is key. Egg, flour, more egg, breadcrumbs. This ensures you have a good crispy coating that adheres to the cheese. It’s a sticky process (see what I did there? haha), but just accept that you’re gonna get your hands messy.
— You must freeze the cheese. No arguments. Otherwise, it will melt in the deep fryer and you’ll have a stringy mess of oily cheese and crumbs, rather than a crispy fried treat with a great cheese pull.
— If you keep the oil at the right temp (350-400 is the sweet spot) frying takes no time at all. Seriously, drop them in for like a minute and then pull them out.
You can also air-fry them, but they don’t get as brown and the cheese pull isn’t as satisfying.
The verdict? These got an A-plus from my fiance, and I really liked them too. They were pretty easy to make and would be a great party appetizers. I hope with a few more tweaks, we can make them suitable for air-frying, which would make them even easier to make.
Next week: American Southwest