January 30th, 2015

Al Capone: "Prohibition has made nothing but trouble."

This week, we took a short break from our mission of watching every movie that has ever won an Oscars for best picture.  We are watching a couple of old T.V. shows on streaming Netflix, Dexter, Sliders, and The Commish.  Dexter, we just started and it seems a little slow but it has potential - a serial killer who kills nobody but serial killers, what's not to like?  Sliders, stars Jerry O'Connell (after he grew up, lost some weight and got kinda hot), who plays Quinn Mallory who travels to alternate dimensions. It's like fifteen years old so some of the special effects are really cheesy but it's a pretty good show!  The Commish, an old series I was able to get Damon to watch because Micheal Chiklas was in it, and Michael Chiklas was in The Shield, a show Damon loved and got me hooked on because Chiklas played a bad ass dirty cop.  I thought Damon would enjoy seeing him play a completely opposite kind of character in The Commish, and Damon got hooked.   

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

Jimmy Dean sausage, caesar salad croutons, refrigerated biscuits, and egg noodles?  Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?????  Really???  Three starches?

So I'm less than pleased with these ingredients and I'm wondering what the hell I can do with so many starches in one dish.  I quickly get the oven preheated, knowing I will definitely need that to do whatever I'm going to do with the biscuits.  Next, I get a pot out and fill it with salted water for the noodles and a skillet out to brown the sausage.  

I start dicing up some vegetables, sweet peppers, red onion, celery, and jalapenos.  The sausage is browned and I throw in the vegetables and turn up the heat on my pasta water.  Next I go after the biscuits.  I can't just serve him biscuits so I flatten out each of the individual biscuit doughs and fill them with shredded cheese, seal them up and form a ball.  

After I roll up the cheese biscuits, I dipped the tops of them into the croutons that I crushed up and throw them in the oven! 

My egg noodles are done so I get them drained, reserving just a small amount of the water in case I need it to thin out my meat sauce.  Next I sprinkle some pepper flake on them and  drizzle them with some balsamic vinaigrette dressing and give them a toss.

I'm at just under twenty minutes and I add some of the dressing into the meat/vegetable mixture, do a quick taste test and I'm good.  I pull out the cheese balls from the oven and I'm on to plating!  I drizzle a little dressing around the bowl, put on the pasta, add a pile of the meat/vegetables mixture on top, sprinkle some crushed croutons on top to tie in the taste, and put three cheese balls on the side.  Just under twelve minutes to go and I serve up!

We dig in and everything turned out pretty damn good.  I thought the pasta itself could have used a little more flavor but overall I was pleased.  Damon really liked the cheese balls, crusting it lightly with the crushed croutons made a big difference, bringing in a garlic flavor that was 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, I ended up with 9.5 points, I dinged myself a point for the flavor of the pasta. 

Damon = 87.5, Christina = 89.5, and that puts me back in the lead, but probably not for long!

Next, we get to bottle our first batch of homemade wine!  We went with strawberry wine, the color and taste somehow came out to be almost peachy, which we certainly didn't expect, being wine made from strawberries, but the clarity was perfect and it had a really good semi-sweet taste.  We quickly started up another batch after our bottling and tasting.  Four months is a long wait for a lousy gallon of wine, but it was fun!  We definitely need to think on a larger scale system.

                                      

             

                                                    


Now that we're done with our mystery bag challenge and bottling our first batch of wine, we're off to watch The West Side Story (1961), I've seen it before.  Dancing, snapping, and singing, oh my!  I know it's a classic but we're not really looking forward to it.  

Next Friday is Damon's turn to cook, tune in to see what I can come up with for him!