September 19th, 2014

W.C. Feilds: "Once, during prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water."

Tonight we started watching Flashpoint, an awesome show about Canada's SRU (Special Response Unit).  We caught a few episodes of it back when it was still on TV and thought it was pretty good so we thought we'd watch the whole show start to finish.  If you haven't seen it, you should give it a shot!

It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our seventh Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's my turn to pick the four mandatory ingredients and Damon's turn to cook.  

Recap: The rules are simple; whoever is cooking has to make dinner using each of the 4 mystery food items that the other has put into the mystery bag.  We can also use other items that we have in the fridge and pantry, but MUST use some of each item from the mystery bag, and MUST be ready to plate-up dinner before 1 hour has passed after seeing the ingredients for the first time.

And here's what Damon ended up with for tonight!

I thought I'd get a little creative tonight and switch things up so nothing was in Damon's bag except for four pieces of folded paper. As Damon opened the first paper, I appear from out of the dinning room with this....

And so on and so forth until he had all four of his pieces of paper and four trays of condiments, meat, cheese, and bread.  And I thought Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. last week? lol 

That's right, I gave Damon a wide assortment of cheeses, meats, breads, and condiments. I think he was impressed with the spread I gave him but also a little intimidated about what to make because he had so many options!  I told him beforehand that when he saw what he had he would be lead to a particular thing.  When we make sandwiches we usually don't do anything too fancy and if were talking lunch meats, it's almost always turkey.  But for a mystery bag challenge I had ramp it up, so I gave him a much wider assortment including, smoked ham, bacon, pastrami, and salami in addition to turkey.  I also gave him some cheeses we don't usually have on hand like provolone,  cheddar, and muenster.  I wanted him to  be free to make whatever kind of sandwich he wanted.  For the bread I also gave him some kinds that we don't normally have.  He got ciabatta rolls, English muffins, a loaf of French bread, and regular sandwich bread.

After processing the amount of choices he had, he started getting his thoughts together and pretty quickly decided on a bread, he went with the ciabatta rolls cut in half. Then he picked the cheese he wanted to use, muenster. Next he decided on the meats.  He went with bacon, smoked ham, pastrami, and salami. Lastly he picked his condiments, mayo, a sweet brown mustard, and sliced tomato.

So with his game plan in place, he starts cooking.  he butters his bread and puts them in the skillet to start toasting, puts some bacon on, and starts to cut vegetables.  He's got a plan and it's coming together nicely.  He can't believe it has taken him so long to make a sandwich but my sweetie always says he likes to take his time with his food, where I on the other hand cook it and cook it fast! lol.

 

 

Next he warms up all the meats he is putting on the sandwich in a skillet, and gets an egg boiling.

 

Damon is running out of time at this point and so he starts on his side dish, he went with a traditional Cesar salad that he tossed with dressing and then added a chopped up hard boiled egg.

  

Lastly, as the clock ticks down, Damon assembles his hot sandwich and puts it, open faced, under the broiler, for just a second or two until the cheese was nice and melted to almost runny.

With only minutes to spare, Damon plates up and serves me dinner.

Looks like it belongs in a restaurant right???  It was awesome, better than any sandwich I've ever made at home and it was so filling!  Damon knocked it out of the park with this one!

A reminder of our scoring system...  

being done on time = 0-1 point

dish presentation = 0-2 points

dish creativity / originality = 0-3 points

dish flavor = 0-3 points

portion size = 0-1 point. 

We did our scoring and in the end, he ended up with an average of a perfect score, 10 points!

Damon = 32, Christina = 23.5, Damon's back in the lead!!

                                Next week is my turn to cook!