Chicken cordon bleu or pink

winner winner gender reveal dinner

Hello, clowns!

Man, I’ve missed your sweet digital faces. The family time and laptop break has been great, but I’ve been itching to get back into the kitchen to cause my usual brand of (in)edible mayhem.

Before I dive in today, if you haven’t seen it already, long-time internet friend and fellow food writer, Adam Reiner, wrote a profile about me and the newsletter for Bon Appétit. Yup, that Bon Appétit. I can’t believe a newsletter filled with threats of me shoving food up my ass made it to such a highly respected food publication. It’s a great profile (okay, I’m biased), but it pieces together all the shit I’ve pulled over the years. Adam even got some people I really admire (chefs and writers!) to talk about my shenanigans, on record.

2024’s first official edition of the newsletter is an interesting one, because I’m dipping my balls into the lifestyle aspect of food. We need to eat items such as food in order to survive, but you can also use food to convey a lot of things (such as joy and celebration). And in the case of today’s cooking experiment, you can use it to disseminate important information.

One event that revolves around food and information is a practice known as a gender reveal party. This is where you gather a bunch of people for a celebration to disclose what gender your future child is going to be. It’s a practice that can potentially go poorly, and in some cases, cause people to come together over funerals instead. That is why food is a heartwarming (and safe) vehicle to disclose the gender of your child to your loved ones without causing bodily harm to them.

Many of my peers have had children by now. Their gender reveal parties have usually involved culinary delights like colored frosting-filled cupcakes, which are a delight to experience. But because this is such a momentous occasion for you and your descendent-to-be, the most important thing about your child’s gender reveal party is that it is more unique than anyone else’s. Since your child is obviously going to be smarter, more talented, and better looking than everyone else’s babies, they must be heralded as such.

So I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, as the greatest food writer in all of history, how can you disrupt the gender reveal party? Can you come up with the next innovation in gender-revealing dishes to make all future parents cool as shit? And hell, if you’re going through your own life changes and want to throw a gender reveal party for the new you, this could be a game changer!”

I closed my eyes and searched deeply within my soul. I realized that gender reveals are oftentimes done through the detonation of hazardous explosives, but in terms of edibles, they are accomplished through sweet treats. Since everyone is always using dessert as a gender-revealing vehicle for food, how about we attempt something savory for once? And what kind of savory filled dish would be a true experience to announce the junk your future child is packing?

Get ready for the gender-revealing chicken cordon bleu.

[And before any of my family members freaks the fuck out (or you, for that matter), no, Davida is not pregnant.]

The only chicken cordon bleu I’ve ever had is the weird microwaveable kind you get in the freezer section at the grocery store.

It was not very good, from what I remember. I didn’t even know people made this stuff at home, but a chicken cutlet that’s wrapped around more meat and then cheese does seem like a crowd pleaser.

Now, you’re probably wondering where the gender reveal comes in. Part of the joy of cutting into chicken cordon bleu is seeing the hot cheese seep out of the center. You’ve seen those horrific-looking rainbow grilled cheese sandwiches floating around TikTok, right? I think you know where this is going.

Do not, under any circumstances, tell a chef that you ever buy handy pre-shredded bags of cheese.

They have been trained to tell you that “Pre-shredded cheese is trash because it’s tossed with non-caking agents such as cellulose, which prevents the cheese from sticking together! It doesn’t melt properly! It doesn’t melt properly!”

Then a gaggle of chefs will barge in through the door and all point their fingers at you. Anyway, I buy pre-shredded cheese every time I go to the store.

Grating cheese by hand is generally a massive pain in the ass (in fact, I watched Davida injure her finger once doing it), but for the sake of this chicken cordon bleu, I needed the shreds to be absolutely naked, so I completed this arduous task by hand.

That’s because I needed to apply food coloring directly to it, and I didn’t want any of that anti-caking powder to get in the way of it adhering to the cheese.

Plus, I was getting really sick of all the chefs breaking down our door. I know them all by name now and they keep eating all of our snacks.

Ah, yes, blue and pink, the only two colors I think of when I think of genitalia.

And now, I will forever associate gender with Swiss cheese.

Next, I pounded out some chicken breasts so they could be thin enough to roll up around slices of ham and the gender revealing cheese.

This was a much more arduous task than I anticipated. It turns out that slamming a meat hammer on your kitchen island repeatedly will scare the shit out of your cats, who will become agitated and eventually start fighting with each other in the next room. Remember, pets can sense how you’re feeling, and that includes this violence within your heart.

Rolling up a gender reveal chicken cordon bleu can test your patience, but I can confirm that it is indeed possible, even with the most inexperienced hands, such as mine.

Basically, you just want to ensure that all the cheese is tucked into the center as tightly as possible so that none of it comes out as you roll it up in a sheet of plastic wrap. You don’t want to ruin the surprise early with some leakage, you know?

Once everything is all wrapped together, you can twirl the edges of the plastic wrap, and if you do it evenly, you’ll end up with a nice chicken log like this.

Place your nice chicken logs in the freezer for an hour and go enjoy your life before the baby shows up. Judging by my friends’ experiences with their babies, you’re going to want to cherish these moments of alone time before the screaming begins.

Next up is the breading.

This part’s pretty easy. Roll your gender reveal chicken cordon bleu in flour, dip it into some beaten egg, then roll it in breadcrumbs. It’s going to be a mess no matter how you do it, but don’t forget that you’re doing this for your child and not at all for the attention you plan on getting for making it.

Then you should have some nice gender reveal chicken tubes like this.

There’s a decent chance that they’ll get leaky along the seams of the chicken breast, but you can weave a toothpick in to try and shut a problem area. (Too bad that strategy never seems to work with my “problem areas.”) Then pop them in the oven at 350°F for 30 minutes, and soon you’ll be greeted with a wonderful bundle of joy.

Once it’s out, go ahead, sprinkle some dried parsley on it!

Dried parsley might not taste like much, but I consider it culinary confetti.

Okay, so my pink gender-revealing chicken cordon bleu wasn’t quite as dramatic as I’d hoped it’d be.

In fact, the pink coloring just makes the chicken look raw in the center, which would upset your party guests, who would all leave, screaming. Obviously the solution to this would have been to add a bunch of extra cheese or roll up the chicken cordon bleu a little tighter, but that’s okay—this is an experiment, after all.

The blue version turned out remarkably well.

Now that is a gender reveal. Imagine your party guests all gasping in awe and admiration of your creative skills when they slice into their lunches and an unnaturally-colored blue cheese starts oozing out. That gasp might actually be because they’re horrified, especially if you didn’t tell them what this get-together was all about. But there’s nothing a well-timed “surprise!” can’t fix.

Of course, if you’re just joshin’ around and have decided to unleash your inner silly goose, you could always just fill the thing with chocolate, because when it comes down to it, this symbolizes the universal thing that lives deep within all of us.

That’s right. I’m ending this one on a dookie joke. You should have seen that one coming from a mile away.

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Welcome to 2024, Food is Stupid style. If you enjoyed today’s edition of the greatest food publication on the planet—one of the best things you can do to support it is to share it with all the people you know. Facebook, Threads, Instagram stories, Bluesky, Reddit, forward it to your friends and family—pick your poison (just not X, because…you know).

And here’s the part where you should really consider upgrading your version of the newsletter to the full thing, because man, if all of you did, I’d literally be able to quit my full-time job to continue making gummy bears out of meat-based baby food. Imagine that.

Don’t worry—that doesn’t mean you don’t get perks: In fact, you get access to the full locked archives (about every other one is behind the paywall, I know, boo), plus you get exclusive editions of the newsletter along the way. This is over four years of my bullshit, including pieces about sandwiches we designed to physically hurt us, recreations of horrible school lunches, and miso soup using tofu-based kitty litter.

Okay, Substack’s web interface has been telling me for a while that this one’s gotten too long, so I’ll have to say goodbye for now. As always, I love you—and I’ll hop into paid subscriber inboxes next week. God, I’ve missed you clowns.