April 3rd, 2015 - Good Friday

Jesus Christ: "I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies;  and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

So we're still on watching our Oscar winning movies.  This week we watched The Sting (1973).  A pretty good movie overall, a little slow in parts but it was pretty good!  

Okay let's get down to it!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our 24th 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!

A pound of ground turkey, white rice, a can of black beans, and a can of sliced carrots.  Yeah, if you're thinking that doesn't sound good, that's what I'm thinking too!!  

What to do, what to do???  I immediately think Mexican food because of the beans and rice but what the hell to do with those carrots??

Anyway, no time to waste.  I get the meat in the skillet and start browning it, I get my pot of water ready for the rice and then take a purusal of the fridge to hopefully get inspired by something and it works.  We have romaine lettuce!!  I'm going to go for a Mexican lettuce wrap!  I start by adding lots of seasoning to the turkey meat to make it taste like something you want to eat and cut up some veg.  Oh and sip on a margarita as I go.... for extra support in my challenge... LOL!

Next, I start thinking about a side dish.  I think the beans, rice, and carrots are all going to get thrown into the wrap, along with some shredded cheese AND queso and some finely diced onions.  But, I can't just serve lettuce wraps, so I'm inspired by something a co-worker of mine often makes and tastes EXCELLENT. A jalapeno and cheese taquito kind of thing... Cream cheese, shredded cheese, Greek yogurt and jalapenos and sweet peppers, rolled up in a flour tortilla rubbed in butter and baked until golden brown.

So I put my mixture together for the wraps, get my lettuce washed, pop my taquito's into the oven, and begin to assemble my wraps and think about plating.

I think I overfilled my wraps a bit but I'm done with time to spare! Dinner is served!!!

It was entirely too much food but everything was GREAT!!!!  The little taquito's were super spicy but how could cheese and jalapeno's not be good???  

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 got another perfect score!!!

Damon = 106.25, Christina = 109.5, and that puts me back in the lead, until next time anyway!

Now we're off to watch our next Oscar winning  movie, The Godfather II (1974) and even though it didn't win an Oscar, we're going to try to squeeze in The Godfather III because you can't just stop at the second one!

                                   

Happy Good Friday to all!!