December 5th, 2014

Paul Prudhomme: "You don't need a silver fork to eat good food."

So we're still on our process of watching every movie that has ever won an Oscars for best picture.  We watched The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and I love Jimmy Stewart and while he was only in a supporting role, he made an entire movie about the circus tolerable. Next up was From Here to Eternity (1953) which was suppose to be the steamiest love scene ever, it was a little kissing and rolling around on the beach as waves of water rushed over them.  Again, I wasn't that impressed and I think I need to stop watching these movies when I'm tired because some of them are literally so slow that about half way through I can't keep my eyes open anymore! 

Okay let's get down to business!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our sixteenth Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's Damon's turn to pick the mandatory ingredients and my 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.  We agreed to turn it up a notch and start thinking more outside the box for the mandatory ingredients we'd be picking for the other!

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

Potato chips, pork cutlets, crushed red pepper flake and some fancy Irish cheddar cheese (that we just got because it was on sale at Sams!)  I think this one might take me a minute but I start to formulate a vague idea.  I've already done stuffed chicken and pork, nothing new and exciting about that, so I decide that I cannot go that route tonight.  I start thinking through a yummy pork melt but that's still just a sandwich of sorts.... Hmmmmm

So, I decide (not knowing exactly what the hell I'm going to make), to fire the skillet and pre-heat the oven, just in case!  Next, I'm going to dice up the pork, but I hated to do it, it was a fine looking piece of meat!!  

I'm about fifteen minutes down and I decide to make a kind of pork empanada.  I'm not making any dough because I don't have time for that but we do have canned biscuits!  I  get the pork in the skillet to cook and start dicing up some jarred jalapeno, the cheese, and cherry tomatoes, mostly because they were on our "to use" shelf but I figured there was no way that the combo wouldn't be yummy together!

   

Okay,  i got my filling all tossed together, I didn't want to put it in the pan with the diced pork because I want my cheese to melt inside the empanada while the dough is cooking.  Now I'm debating if I need a sauce of some kind or if I should go straight to making the side.  I'm flattening out the biscuit, putting the filling in, fold it up, then I brush it with an egg wash and dip it in the crushed up potato chips.  About fifteen minutes to go and they are in the oven!

Now, quickly on to my side dish.  I want to go with a simple apple cheese crumble.  I dice up an an apple and pull three kinds of cheese out.  Feta, Blue Cheese, and of course the Irish Cheddar to tie it into my main dish. 

After taking a quick look in the oven and seeing that my main dish is coming along nicely, I fire the apples, warming them up just a bit and then toss in my three cheeses..... Yummy!!  Who doesn't like apple and cheese????

Anyway, I'm down to the wire but I start my plating as Damon gives me my countdown and with only seconds left, I serve it up!

I was a little iffy about doing a sauce or not but Damon thought everything tasted great.  He was even impressed with my creativity for thinking up the dish because he so didn't think anything like that when he picked my ingredients.  Yea me!!!

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, after having seconds of dinner, and in the end, I ended up with a perfect 10 points. 

Damon = 70.5, Christina = 70.5, and that puts us back to a tie, damn!!!

Now that were done with dinner, we're off to start our classic Christmas marathon.  We're a little late  getting started this year but we've been pretty busy!  Anyway, we were debating why A Christmas Story was a classic, neither of us have seen it in forever so we decided we would watch it to kick off our marathon!  

Next Friday is the 5 year anniversary of when Damon proposed so we're thinking of a nice quiet steak dinner at home instead of our challenge.