Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where today, we’re discussing The Princess Switch 2: Switched Again. After the warm reception our review of the first one received last year, I figure: why stop when you’ve got a good thing going? And let me tell you, that was the EXACT same thought everyone involved in this movie had.

Netflix and No Chill

In case you forgot, the Princess Switch is a Netflix original from 2018 about a Chicago baker unexpectedly going to an international baking competition, discovering she looks exactly like a local duchess, and the two switching roles for a day for reasons I do not at present remember. Seriously. The explanation wasn’t important enough to include in my review last year, and I certainly don’t remember it now. The baker falls for the prince, the duchess falls for the baker’s sous-chef, the men fall in love with their respective partners, the prince and the baker end up getting married.

Spoilers, I guess. “The Netflix Christmas Movie has a happy ending”. Who could have predicted?

Switched Again opens up telling us that, since those events 2 years ago (which will be a bit of a problem in a minute), the King of Montenaro died, and now Margaret is going to inherit the throne, which has ended up ending her relationship with Kevin! And the rest of the movie…is fine. Look, I’m not going to lie to you guys, it’s solid B- film-making. But at least the first one included baking at the beginning and END of the movie. This one has 3 scenes that involve food in any real capacity, and they’re all in the first 15 minutes.

The last time flour plays a relevant roll in this film about a baker, and it’s for functional white-face. Shame.

The story is “now that Margaret’s going to be Queen, she’s being pushed to be more regal, and consider a romantic partner more befitting her station, and oh, by the way, she has a (implicitly slutty) scheming cousin who looks just like her with dyed hair we didn’t mention in the first movie at all. The cousin decides “hey, if that rando could impersonate my cousin for a day, so could I, and I could use that time to ascend to the throne, immediately pay myself a hundred million dollars, and flee the country, setting me up for life”

I will note that scheming cousin and her minions are maybe the funnest part of the film, in the same way that Skeletor is the most entertaining part of He-Man.

Of course, she chooses to do enact her plan while her cousin is swapped with the baker in order to have a day just to herself with Kevin, so they can both be honest about how they feel, so the wrong girl gets kidnapped, drama drama drama, it all works out.

The film is fun for me as an actor because I get to watch a very broad but well-executed version of “I’m the dude playing a dude disguised as another dude”, and honestly, the new villain and her hench-people are fun. I’d call it a little less charming overall than the first one, because I think it missed a couple opportunities:

First, the magic Christmas spirit guy only gets ONE appearance. Indeed, most of the side cast gets kind of boned, with little to really do or add. Hell, they straight up just REPLACE the daughter!

Second, I wish they’d made the prince smarter. There’s a moment, right after the swap happens, where he sees Margaret (the duchess) as his wife, tries to talk to her, and she stumbles a little over her explanations. Then, he sees his wife as Margaret, and seems to get an idea…which turns out to be talking to her about how he feels like he hasn’t gotten to be with his wife the last several months because she’s so busy, and he worries he’s somehow letting her down. And I would have LOVED it if, when it all goes down, he had revealed that he immediately knew they were swapped. Have him toss out some line of “Of course I knew. I love Stacie too much for a little hairspray and an accent to fool me.” Great little line, and it serves as a fun mirror to the villains: the bad cousin gets caught out by a secondary villain because she forgot to cover a tattoo, so he identified the fake by physical traits, while the prince saw past those to love, or whatever.  

Third, and I know this isn’t technically their fault, but as I noted, the first movie set itself in 2018, because the main character’s favorite Christmas movie is from 2017. You then set THIS film two years later, and…Man, did it turn out that you shouldn’t have just assumed that 2020 was going to be the same as 2019.

It was a perfectly fine film to have on while I did stuff on my phone, but there wasn’t nearly enough content for me to justify talking about it for a whole post. Which is why instead, we’re going to talk about Pirozhki. Because today is a SURPRISE DOUBLE-SEQUEL. Well, not really a surprise. I mentioned it in the title. But that’s just so I don’t have a moment where I’m trying to find my PIrozhki post in a couple months/years, and don’t know where it is.

Poppin’ Out

Mildly funny story on how this came about: So, Sunday afternoon, I saw an ad that a famous piroshky place (and, in case you forgot from last year: Pirozhky are like fancy Eastern European Hostess Pies/Hot Pockets. Flaky dough, filled with sweet or savory stuff.) in Seattle was going to be doing a “pick-up truck” (I don’t know if they call it that, but holy shit, I just realized how great a name that is.) where you place an order with them, they load it into the truck, the truck drives to a location, and you go pick it up. It’s a new thing they’ve been doing for…I wanna say about 10-11 months now.

Who can say why.

So they were going to be in Bremerton (about 20 minutes away), instead of in Pike Place (at least an hour away, depending on traffic, and you have to find parking in Seattle). Which struck me as a great opportunity for us to try their stuff out. A little over an hour later, I discussed it with my mom, who agreed she wanted to try it, we picked out an assortment of pirozhki…and learned that we were an hour late: the orders had to be in by 2, and it was now 3. And they weren’t planning on being back in Bremerton any time soon. Bummer, but these things happen.

Then, out of curiosity, I started playing with the other options on their site. They had the pick-up truck, and like, 4 locations you could do pick-up at. There was local delivery in “the greater seattle area” (we don’t count, I checked.), shipping nationwide, I was just futzing around, and discovered that I could set a pick-up downtown…but the site wouldn’t let me order it. It kept saying “Price: NaN”. NaN is code-speak for “Not a Number”, and it meant that, for some reason, it wasn’t going to let me order. I checked further: was it the time? Are they not open then? Was I setting the pick-up date too soon? Eventually, I found out that it was that, for some reason, it wouldn’t accept a tip.  (I attempted to replicate it today, and it worked perfectly fine, so it was likely just some minor bug in the coding) Which I proved, by completing an order. …meaning I now had a $50+ order of Pirozhki to go pick up in Seattle in a couple days. Which is why today, I left the house at 11:30, and didn’t get back until 4:20, because I hit up the Pirozhki shop, a Ginger Beer store, a book store, and an Asian supermarket. See, it’s sentences like that that remind me I’m a bougie asshole, and Seattle is a weird city.

At which point we did a savory pirozhki tasting, and NOW YOU’RE A PART OF IT.

Pirozhki 1: Potato and Mushroom

It was only after eating this giant pierogi-looking sucker that I thought “Maybe I should take the pictures of the INSIDE, so I’m not just photographing the same shapes and folds”.

Quick point here: I picked up the pirozhki at 1:10ish, and we didn’t eat until about 4:45, so obviously they needed to be perked up a bit. (the instructions from their shipping companies note that most of them can be eaten at room temp, the savory ones should just be warmed up a bit.) So we popped them into a 250 degree oven for like, 5 minutes.

The interesting thing about this pirozhki at first was the texture: from the name, I assumed I would be dealing with like, a mushroom gravy with chunks of potatoes. No, this is more like a hashbrown with some mushrooms and sautéed green onion tossed in. The green onion was particularly interesting, being sharper than we expected it to be, and weirdly cut. We first thought it might be flecks of a chili pepper.

Pirozhki 2: Curry Chicken and Rice

There’s so much beige and brown going on here.

This one had a much flakier crust, which I’m only just now realizing is probably because the potato mushroom is vegan, so there’s probably butter in the dough on this one. Anywho, we liked it. It’s a mild but distinctly curry taste, in a flaky shell. Not a ton to add, other than it’s one of those moments of “oh, yeah, I guess if we know about Curry, of course Russia knows about it. There’s ONE country between those two.” N

Nate and I both remarked that this one, as well as the first, weren’t exactly “heated”, but they weren’t cold either.  

Pirozhki number 3: Cheddar Garlic Roll

I stared at this roll so long for a joke, I convinced myself it kind of looks like Sid the Sloth from Ice Age.

What? They sell things other than Pirozhki. Not MANY things, but this big ol’ roll is one of them. Interestingly, none of us could really pick up the garlic in the roll, other than a sort of general savory quality. It DID do one of my favorite bread things, where like, real cheese breads will have the gap-pockets, where the melting cheese coats the edges of the space it originally filled, but the rendering fat causes it to shrink, leaving a gap in the middle. I don’t know why, but the little ring of cheese with a hole in the middle is really pleasing to me.

Pirozhki 4: Beef and Onion

I like how the crust here looks kind of like the thing with the cheese I liked a second ago.

The pierogi was very tasty, in a way that reminds you that “hey, yeah, Beef and onion ARE both things that just taste good when properly cooked”.  But it was at this point that we realized that maybe a tasting of 7 savory pirozhki (well, 6 and a roll) and 5 sweet ones was an ambitious plan, since, mathematically, it meant that by the end of the process, we’d all have eaten 4 whole pirozhki on our own. Which, according to some sources, would be about 1600 calories. As such, we decided to finish the savory ones (since we had already tossed the second batch into the oven), and eat the sweet ones later, since Mom and Nate were starting to get a little sick. I was feeling fine, though Nate and I made several jokes that it was just the matter of my larger size: in a half-hour or so, I was undoubtedly going to freeze up and topple over like a brontosaurus having a stroke.

Piroszhki 5: Ham, Cheese, Spinach

Is there egg in this? I should have checked that before now.

This one was, in my opinion, easily the weakest of the bunch, but it had two things working against it: Firstly, I don’t like ham as much as…basically any other red or white non-game meat. Second, by this point, we’d become a little lax on the timing, so this guy didn’t get a full 5-7 minutes in the oven, so it was still cold in the middle. (While I had been served them functionally room temp, I transported them in a cooler along with some frozen pierogi, so the bottom couple got a little cold) Honestly, I think with the proper heat, it would have been fine.

Pirozhki 6: Beef and Cheese

I think this is easily the most visually appealing shot of the bunch.

This was a (very minor) tragedy, as I had actually ordered a Bacon Cheeseburger piroshky…but the location I did the pick-up at didn’t carry that one, so they let me choose whatever flavor I wanted. This one also could have used a little more time in the heat, but it carried off being tepid fairly well. It wasn’t quite as good as the beef and onion, in my opinion, but that might have just been novelty: the seasoning with the beef and onion was more pronounced.

Pirozhki 7: Bacon, Egg, Hashbrown

That doesn’t look much like bacon. Or eggs.

Wait. This is…just the beef and cheese again. Huh. We SHOULD have a Bacon, Egg, and Hashbrown. And it’s not like this would have been an easy mistake for me to make: we got ONE of everything we got. So this is definitely their mistake. Or another little hiccup in the system. Which is fine, either way. This is a stressful time for all of us, and messing up one pirozhki in an order of 12 isn’t too bad. It’s slightly disappointing, in that of all of them, my mother sounded the most interested in this one, on the grounds that “if it’s good, it would be a good one to buy a bunch frozen for quick breakfasts.”

Still, everything we did eat was quite nice. We liked the crusts, and the fillings (even the ham and egg was just meh to me, not actively bad). So if they have another truck coming near us, we’ll probably try them again sometime. Or we’ll order them delivered. Or whatever. IT ALL WORKED OUT IN THE END, BOOM, TIED THESE BACK TOGETHER THEMATICALLY. Uh oh. There’ s the brontosaurus moment. Good niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-

MONDAY: OH SHIT, I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PREPPING SOMETHING FOR THAT, WASN’T I? UMMMM…. OH, I KNOW, I JUST BOUGHT MILK BREAD, AND JUST HARVESTED SOME EGGS, SO I’LL DO A JAPANESE EGG SALAD SANDWICH. MAYBE THE MILK BREAD TOO, IF I HAVE THE PAN/TIME.

THURSDAY: DUDE, I HAVE BEEN MILDLY UNCOMFORTABLE FOR SEVERAL HOURS NOW, SO I’M GOING TO CALL IT A NIGHT.