March 13th, 2015

Orson Welles: "My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people."

So we're still on watching our Best Picture Oscar winning movies.  This week we watched The Godfather (1972).  How has anyone not seen or not liked The Godfather???  I don't get it, the movies were awesome and we enjoyed watching the first of the trilogy and we are looking forward to finishing that out.  

Okay let's get down to it!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our 23rd 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 pound of ground turkey, zucchini, refrigerated crescent rolls, and a can of pears.  Yeah, I'm pretty damn pleased with myself.  I didn't necessarily think of something that he could make with this but I also had lots of faith that he could make it work!  As you can see, Damon wasn't so happy about his mystery bag!  

Damon says that I didn't totally screw him on this bag but it's a challenge for sure.  We always have a hard time thinking what to do with ground turkey, even when it's not a challenge.  Some thoughts for you, if you don't particularly care for ground turkey; use it in saucy or big flavor dishes (then you don't really know it's turkey), such as chili, spaghetti, or if your whipping up some rotel. Another thing you can do is mix it with ground beef for a large meatloaf.  You can also just add some seasoning and it makes a huge difference, I like to go with some sage, oregano, and crushed pepper flake.

Anyway, while I'm apologizing for the not so inspiring bag I gave Damon, he gets to work.  He puts the meat into a bowl and begins adding some spices along with Parmesan cheese and makes some meatballs.

Next, he begins to chop some vegetables, onions and zucchini.  Then he starts thinking about those damn canned pears and decides to cut some white cheddar.

He decides to do a vegetable medley with the zucchini. He chopped them up with some red onion and does some fancy tossing as he sauteed the vegetables. Then he starts to assemble his crescent rolls, rolling up pieces of the canned pairs with some white cheddar inside the rolls.  He gets them into the oven and then gets some pasta cooking.  Next, I can tell he's in his head thinking about how to plate.

As usual, he pulls it off and with just a few minutes to spare.  He serves me my spaghetti and meatballs topped with a sautéed onion and zucchini medley, served with pear & cheddar stuffed crescent rolls on the side.

We dig in and everything tasted great.  I especially liked the fruit/cheese crescents, but I'm a huge bread and cheese freak!  I think I didn't care as much for the zucchini being in the spaghetti but hey, this is about trying new things!  Damon loved the zucchini in the pasta but I think he's still iffy on the crescents.

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 gave himself a 9, he felt like he lacked creativity and I didn't think that was worth a whole point off so I gave him a 9.5 (I think our first half point off lol) and he ended up with 9.25 points.  

Damon = 106.25, Christina = 99.5, and that puts Damon back in the lead, and the first to break 100 points!

                                   

Happy Friday the 13th everyone!!