October 3rd, 2014

Orson Welles: "Ask not what you can do for your country.  Ask what's for lunch."

Tonight we started our marathon of watching every movie that has ever won a Best Picture Oscar.  Of course, we started with the beginning, the very first movie to win the very first Best Picture Oscar was a movie called Wings in 1928.  It was a silent film and it was better than either of us expected but I have to admit, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open!  Not because the movie was so awful, I've just been exhausted the last couple of weeks.

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

Recap: The rules are simple; whoever is cooking has to make dinner using each of the 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 pulled a little trick on Damon, all I gave him was one item, his protein and I went with Smoked Sausage! This can be a good thing because you get to chose the rest of what you use or it could be a bad thing because that leaves you with soooo many options.  

Damon decides pretty quickly that he's going to do kabobs and so he gets out some wooden skewers got them soaking in water, so they wont catch on fire under the broiler, then he started cutting up his peppers and onions that are going on the skewers with the sausage pieces.

Next, Damon's on to working on his side dish, cutting vegetables and getting some rice cooking.

Damon's got his kabobs all prepped and ready to go into the oven on high heat and quickly finishes up his rice by adding some left over adobo sauce, diced tomato, and green onion.
  

With several minutes to spare, Damon plates up and serves my dinner.  How professional does that look!

It looks great and tastes great!! We finish our dinner and talk scoring.  Damon of course is harder on himself than I think he should be.  To me the roasted vegetables and the seared smoked sausage went great with the veggies from the rice!!

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, Damon ended up with an average 9.5 points!

Damon = 41.5, Christina = 33.5, and that puts Damon back in the lead!!

Saturday we went to check out Lincoln's Apple Festival, the free apples and cider was worth the drive.  It was a much bigger event than we thought it would be.  It was pretty crowded but we had a good time.

Next week is my turn to cook!