September 12th, 2014

Julia Child: "The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."

Tonight we are starting on season nine of Criminal Minds. We'll wrap it up over the weekend and then we will have to wait until 10/1 for the tenth season to start, I so can't wait.  I'm already having withdrawals waiting for Walking Dead to come back on, and now we have to wait for Criminal Minds too!  I think I should just stop watching TV shows until they get cancelled and then I can binge watch all I want on Netflix!

It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our sixth Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's Damon's turn to pick the four mandatory ingredients and my 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 I ended up with for tonight!

A package of Jimmy Dean sausage links, home grown roma tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, and onion!  Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot? 

What do you think you could cook up with these four ingredients? 

After seeing what I had to work with, I decided to go Mexican. Initially I was of course thinking breakfast, because I LOVE to eat breakfast for dinner, but I thought that would be too predictable and not overly creative.  I mean, there's only so many ways you can make eggs and we've done them all. 

So after some debating with myself aloud, I just started working.  I got a pan ready to cook the sausage and started chopping up my vegetables.

Okay, at this point I have to pull the trigger and I finally decide to go with a kind of tostada/quesadilla kind of thing, stacked and full of yummy cheesy goodness!  I of course couldn't make just a simple quesadilla, I had to make it something different, and hopefully better!  I get my flour tortillas out and butter the cast iron skillet, turn on the oven, and start browning my tortillas one at a time and on both sides.  I pop them in the oven to keep them crisp until I get down to the last one.

I'm getting my cheese going on the bottom tortilla and let it start to melt and then begin adding the chopped up sausage, onions, jalapenos, and sweet peppers, then top that with a little more cheese.  Then I add on the second tortilla, and repeat with cheese and veggies.  My time is running out as I throw on the top tortilla and chop up some tomato to garnish my stacked sausage tostada. 

I need a side so what better than rice, but although I can make perfect white rice, I can't just make white rice tonight, tonight I have to be more creative than that.  I start with white rice and decide to add some smoked jalapeno peppers in adobo sauce and mix it all in.  Oh, and remember that yummy green chili cheese sauce Damon made during his challenge last week, way to use leftovers, yo!  So I warmed up what we had left of it.

The sauce has butter, flour, milk, Monterrey Jack cheese, and green chilies.  I'm down to the wire at this point so I pull my tostada out of the skillet and cut it like a pizza, I pour the cheese sauce over the top and add the diced tomato.

 

I even tried to be fancy and spread some of the cheese sauce on the plate, not sure if that worked how I imagined it now that I'm looking at the picture, it kinda looks like a fucked up happy face lol! It was still a good dinner!

 

  

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, I ended up with an average of a perfect score, 10 points!

Damon = 22, Christina = 23.5, I'm in the lead!!

 

Next week is Damon's turn to cook!