March 6th, 2015

Unknown: "Age and glasses of wine should never be counted."

So we're still binge streaming the t.v shows I told you about before, Sons of Anarchy, we got to the end of season six and found out that the last season isn't yet available on Netflix which really sucks!!! We haven't tried to pick back up on Madmen yet and we still have a few episodes of Sliders to go.  We also realized that we have far too many movies that weren't that good, or that we just don't ever watch because they weren't one of our favorites, so we've been trying to watch those and thin out our collection as much as we can.  It's my "fun Spring cleaning project".

As far as our Oscar winning movies, this week we watched Midnight Cowboy (1969).  It wasn't the best movie in the world but definitely better than some that we've seen on this list, and Dustin Hoffman is always awesome, and it included his famous "I'm walking here" line!  Next we watched Patton (1970), which we actually own because it is one of Damon's very favorite movies of all time.  And, how could you not love this speech from Patton???

Okay let's get down to it!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our 22nd Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's Damon's turn to pick the mandatory ingredients and my turn to cook.  It's been forever since we've had a challenge so here's a recap!

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!

A pound of ground beef, parmesean cheese, green chilies, and french loaf bread.  Hmmmm..... It's been awhile since our last challenge so I'm going to need a minute to get my creative juices flowing!  

We've been so busy lately and I don't feel overly creative but after a glass of wine and thinking about it, I decide to go with a cheeseburger sub.

I put the beef, parmesean cheese, some diced onion, crushed pepper flake, and seasoning salt into a bowl and mix it all up.  Then I form two oblong 1/2 pound "patties" and put them to the fire.  I get out some swiss and american cheese, green chilies, lettuce and tomato, jalapenos, and mayo for my toppings and condiments. Then I whip up some of my famous macaroni and cheese and begin to figure out my plating.

I serve Damon his cheeseburger sub, which I thought was terribly creative, doing something normal with a bit of a twist!  During cooking I had a glass or two or three of wine and stopped thinking about plating but here we are:

We dig in and everything tasted great.  I think I probably could have been more creative but 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, I ended up with 10 points.  

Damon = 97, Christina = 99.5, and that puts me back in the lead, but not by much!

Now we're off to watch the next of our best picture Oscar winning movies, The French Connection (1971), and if we have time we'll tear into The Godfather (1972)!

                                   

Happy Friday everyone!!