December 19th, 2014

Erma Bombeck: "Seize the moment.  Remember all those women on the Titanic that waved off the dessert cart."

So we're still on our process of watching every movie that has ever won an Oscars for best picture.  We watched Marty (1955) which was one of the best ones I think we've watched.  It was a kind of romantic comedy but it was cute and I didn't almost fall asleep once! 

Okay let's get down to business!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our seventeenth Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's my turn to pick the mandatory ingredients and Damon's turn to cook.  This will probably be the last challenge of 2014 since the holidays are so quickly approaching!!

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 Damon ended up with for tonight!

Potatoes, a jar of queso, green onion, and chorizo sausage!  I have never used chorizo in anything before, and I might not have ever even eaten it before.  I chose it to switch things up a bit and I figured that they are always using it on all the cooking shows we watch so how hard could it be to work with?

Now, we only have an hour to have our dish plated, so anytime you get potatoes you really need to get a plan together quick.  Sure you could nuke them if you had to but it's so much easier just to get a plan together and get them started first.

Damon promptly gets his potatoes sliced and his chorizo in the skillet.  I don't know why but I was expecting a different consistency on the chorizo. It seems like on tv when they use it, it's more of a link or a ground sausage consistency, like you could cut or crumble it up, but this stuff was like toothpaste!  Poor Damon!

   

Damon decides to go with a type of au gratin potato casarole.  He's making a cheese sauce with of course the jarred queso, shredded colby jack, and cheddar cheese.  He's also using the chorizo in the cheese sauce.  He's layering everything in, cheese sauce, potato, more shredded cheese, and repeat.  

Damon is at the halfway mark and is about to pop the casserole dish into the oven.  He keeps an eye on the dish as he thinks how in the world he's going to plate his dish.  He won't have much time at all to let it set after he pulls it from the oven and you know if you don't let something like this set, it will fall apart when you go to take it out of the dish.

   

Here it is, potato, cheesy, yummy goodness and Damon lets it sit as long as he can while he gets his plating together in his mind.  The timer is close to going off and he goes ahead and get ready to plate.  He chops some lettuce and tomato, and gets some toast going. Quickly, he plates and serves, as the timer is going off!

Damon wasn't overly pleased with his plating, like I said, making anything out of a casserole dish is hard to make look very elegant, but a very valiant effort.  Adding the salad around it made it look great and it went really well together.  It tasted great, but visually it didn't help that Damon kept saying it looked like dog food while he was making the chorizo/cheese mixture lol.  Still, it tasted great!

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 8 points. 

Damon = 78.5, Christina = 70.5, and that puts us back to a tie, damn!!!

Now that were done with dinner, we're off to do some more of our classic Christmas marathon.  Tonight we're going to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, everyone should watch this every Christmas, it never gets old!!!  

Next Friday will be the Friday after Christmas and we plan on getting a hotel, going out for a nice steak dinner and popping some champagne, Merry Christmas to us!!  Don't worry, we'll pick up the challenge in the new year!