February 6th, 2015

Mark Twain: "Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."

So we're still binge streaming the t.v shows I told you about last week, Sliders, The Commish, and Dexter.  We're mostly watching Dexter.  It was pretty slow getting started but we're both REALLY hooked on it now.  I wasn't sure if it was a show we would really get into, but it really picked up after the first season and now we're almost on season seven, and can' stop watching!!  We've also gotten back on track with our watching every movie in history that has ever won a Best Picture Oscar. We are now into the 1960s.  This week we watched Lawrence of Arabia (1962). It was a really good movie but it was another one of those three hour epic movies, and I continue to find those pretty hard to sit all the way through, ADD I guess.  

Okay let's get down to it!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our 21st 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.  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!

A can of apple sauce, chicken flavored ramen noodles, cheddar bratwursts, and pepperonis.  We decided to turn things up a notch and so I literally just picked these a few minutes before we started the challenge.  What would you do with that!!   

Damon gets things going pretty quickly! He gets his pans out, take the skins off of the bratwurst and starts frying it up with the peperonis he diced up, and boils his ramen noodles. 

Once his meat is cooked, he puts it into a bowl with some diced red onion, seasoned bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, and what surprised me the most was that he chopped up his cooked ramen noodles and threw that into the mixture as well.  

He used an egg to hold the mixture together and made little patties out of the mixture and called them "croquets" and put them into a pan to fry. 

Everything is smelling good at this point and Damon starts working on the apple sauce.  He added some whiskey, honey, and siracha chili sauce to it, to make sauce for his croquets. Next he gets some broccoli steaming for a side.  Damon is doing good on time and begins to plate.  With plenty of time to spare, Damon plates up and serves me my dinner.   

We dig in and everything tasted great.  Damon thought he went a little overboard with the amount of apple sauce, but I thought the sweet and spiciness of it went really well with the taste of the bratwurst meat in the croquets.

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 9 points.  He dinged himself 1 point for the apple sauce, but I gave him a full 10 points, because I really liked it all. 

Damon = 97, Christina = 89.5, and that puts him back in the lead, but not for long!

Now we're off to watch the next of our best picture Oscar winning movies, My Fair Lady (1964), we've seen this before and it's a great movie but again with the singing.......  Here we go!

                                   

Next Friday I'll be taking a break, have a busy week ahead and don't think I'll be feeling overly creative come Friday!