Interesting Combination

For all that the Mild Wife and I like to cook and prepare our own food, we still enjoy some of the simple things in life. We still buy fast food every now and then, there is a monthly Cheeto allocation, and we have done things like eat dino nuggets for dinner. The point here is that we have no qualms about consuming food that is, shall we say, less-than-gourmet. Sure, some of those options probably have less nutritional value than the , but so long as our diet doesn't consist solely of dino nuggets, I figure we're fine. Basically, we like to live a little.

I mention this because this particular habit carries over to how we buy groceries. We like buying fruits and vegetables because they're good for us, but some other items make their way into our baskets, shamelessly so. The Cheetos aren't going to allocate themselves into our jar, for example. We've been known to buy frozen food or ice cream, too. Like I said, so long as we consume it all in moderation, I figure we're fine.

During the latest grocery run, I picked up some frozen potstickers. We like to snack on these or to use them as a bit of an appetizer sometimes, particularly since they are easy to prepare. Now, that's actually part of the story in this case. Half of the time, those packages say something like "microwave only." Well, here's how we usually prepare them:

Pictured: not a microwave

So, we're marching to our own drum from the get go when it comes to these foods. Frankly, it just seems like an easy enough option that we default to steaming them. We've never had a problem with cooking or heating them this way, and they come out fairly moist when you steam them this way. All in all, it seems like a good idea.

The second half of the potsticker story, though, involves more shenanigans. During one particular shopping trip, I'd picked up a different brand of frozen potstickers from the grocery store. I think that brand was cheaper than the other, but the actual reason isn't all that relevant to the story. The salient point was that it was a brand we'd never eaten before.

So, we cooked them as usual (see the picture above), and then tried dipping them in the inevitable sauce that comes in the packaging. Now, for all that we were okay with the frozen, store-bought potstickers, we were decidedly not okay with the sauce. The sauce tasted overly sweet and just seemed out of place with the actual potstickers. It was just ... wrong.

As a result, we were left pondering whether to eat the potstickers by themselves or to produce another sauce. We've actually eaten said potstickers au naturel before without any problem, but we were feeling like sauce. The most natural choice would have been soy sauce, but on this occasion, genius struck. I had just gone shopping recently, so I knew that we had Pace salsa in the fridge. Yes, the Pace salsa that's commonly used for "Mexican food." I'm positive you've seen it or heard of it before.

This one

I could practically feel the grin creeping on to my face as the thought began to crystallize.

The Mild Wife, bless her heart, went along with my craziness. We both realized that this was an outlandish plan, so we started out with a small amount of salsa. We dipped a single, solitary potsticker into a small amount of salsa, and ... it tasted good. Well, it wasn't gourmet or anything, but it tasted fine. We didn't have any issues with the pairing. We giggled like mad as we finished the potstickers and the salsa.

You want to know the best part of this whole thing? I posted a short blurb about this pairing on social media, and one of my friends responded with, "this is not okay, but given your background, I will allow this." Yup, my melting pot of an ancestry saved me once again.

The whole thing is still a bit of a joke in our household, and I'm grinning a little bit even as I write this now. I'm totally going to pair those two again at some point. It may not be anytime soon, but it's going to happen. Just you wait.