found drama

If you haven’t seen Chopped… well, it’s pretty much my favorite show on TV ¹. And it’s pretty awesome. If you’re not familiar with the premise, here is the nickel tour: four chefs compete for a shot at $10,000–they get a basket of three-or-four of “mystery ingredients” for each course (appetizer, entree, and dessert)–and they have a limited time (per-course) to use all of those mystery ingredients in their dish.

Anyway, it’s awesome.

And I thought it might be cool to be on the show. Only I’m not a professional chef, so instead I thought I might settle for doing a variation on the show for my birthday dinner party. My idea for the variation:

1. Each couple brings a set of mystery ingredients (they are assigned to shop for a course beforehand);
2. Each couple then has to cook a course at the party (but they only know they’re not cooking the course that they brought ingredients for);
3. And then at “game time”, you get the usual time limits (20 or 30 minutes) to cook your course; and/but
4. We’ll let you finish what you’ve started–because who wants to get food poisoning?

And well, we had a couple drop out ² so we were down to two. So here’s how it shook out: we bought the entree ingredients, and made the dessert ahead of time; they brought the appetizer ingredients…

And it turned out… Not bad!

Appetizer course:

We were presented with:

• ground turkey;
• croissants;
• pimentos; and
• persimmons.

It was a little hairy but 20 minutes plus about 4 we ended up with:

“French Toast Turkey Sliders”–

• Turkey sliders with poultry seasoning and shredded carrot fried;
• croissant “French toast” fries with cinnamon and ginger; and
• a fruit relish of pimentos, pineapple, persimmon and chopped savory.

Verdict: not bad! For those that got crispy “French toast fries”–they loved them. And the turkey sliders were at least passable.

Then…

Entree course:

We presented them with:

• chicken stock;
• canned butter beans;
• dried papaya; and
• elk meat.

And in 30 minutes plus 3, they gave us:

“Deconstructed Americana Kebabs”–

• A deconstructed elk kebabs;
• papaya-sweetened butter bean mash
• grilled veggies; and
• a grilled croissant wedge.

Verdict: butter bean mash was the hit of the night–everyone loved it–like a sweet mashed potatoes almost. And if you haven’t had elk before ³–well, it’s a lot like beef. So that was good. And it was fun to see some of the first round’s mystery ingredients make a slight reprise.

As for dessert. How can you go wrong with a pineapple upside down cake (with sour cherries)?

Delicious. And quite a fun night.

The whole picture set is here on Flickr.

1. Or at least my favorite show on Food Network.[↩]
2. Well, they RSVP’d as “can’t make it” so…[↩]
3. We hasn’t.[↩]

About Rob Friesel

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