The hubs loves him some Chopped. It’s on for like four hours every weeknight and I swear he could watch every episode every night. (If you don’t know the show, four chefs are presented with a mystery basket of ingredients. In the appetizer round, they are given 20 minutes to use all ingredients in one dish. One chef is chopped and they move on to the main course, and then dessert, leaving one champion. Each round had a new mystery basket. Simple yet satisfying). Also we are trying to do a better job of grocery shopping and cooking so we don’t spend all our money eating out every night.
Today I got home first, realized we had no food and gave myself a challenge. Rather than go to a grocery store, I would go right next door to the store that is more like the Kwik E Mart than a store and see if I could find enough ingredients to make a dinner. I was pleasantly surprised by the fresh jalapeno peppers, avocados and tomatoes-jackpot! I also grabbed some thin noodles and $3 later (yes $3!) I had an opaque bag of fresh veggies and noodles.
The opaque bag is important because it gave me the idea to present the hubs with the chopped challenge. Once home, I added Greek yogurt and our new favorite hot sauce-Cholula-to the bag.
When the hubs came home, he was excited about trying it. He was confused and challenged by my ingredients. (In fact he ended up cheating and not using the Greek yogurt that I had thrown in as both a challenge and a potential sauce base). He started with the noodles, boiling them, and chopping up the veggies. From here he started to heat and reduce the tomatoes to a sauce with Cholula and peppers. Where things go downhill is his treatment of the peppers. Including them in the sauce-great. Leaving a bunch of seeds in-no thank you.
He mixed everything together and put it right in the fridge, envisioning a sort of cold, spicy noodle “salad.” We gave it a few minutes then tasted it with the avocado. It would have been delicious if it wasn’t also burning our mouths. Take all the seeds out people. We don’t need em!
Really both challenges (corner store shopping and Chopped) were fun. A definite retry to (hopefully) better results.
year of fun 