Valentine's Date: Chopped

This year, Lucas and I celebrated our very first Valentine's date as a married couple. It was our fifth altogether! Anyways, I wanted to do something kinda different and fun. So I had to figure out what we could  do that would have special meaning to us. I came up with doing a at home version of Chopped. For those who don't know what Chopped is, here is a excerpt from wiki. 

The challenge is to take a mystery box of ingredients and turn them into a dish that is judged on their creativity , presentation, and taste with minimal time to plan and execute.The show is divided into three rounds: appetizer, entree and dessert. In each round, the chefs are given a basket containing between three and five ingredients, and the dish each competitor prepares must contain each of those ingredients. 

We changed a few rules but for the most part is was very "Chopped"-like in nature. Because at our house we do not have a completely stocked pantry like they do on the show, our biggest change was a trip to the grocery store. After we saw the ingredients in all three baskets, we went to the grocery store and had 15 minutes and 10 dollars to get any extra ingredients that we might need for our dish. 

Our first basket was for the appetizer round. The ingredients: instant mashed potatoes, apples, canned chicken breast, and graham crackers. We had twenty minutes to make a presentable dish with these ingredients. Let me first say that 20 minutes goes incredibly fast when you are panicking and have no idea what you are really doing haha. 

Appetizer Basket

I made an apple chicken salad. I shredded the chicken, added mayo, sour cream, apple chunks and celery. I also added some potato flakes to thicken it up a little bit. I then sprinkled it with graham cracker because I had no idea what to do with it. It was surprisingly really good. 

Kristina's apple chicken salad with a graham cracker garnish

Lucas made a sauteed chicken/apple/onion mix that was delicious, with a side of mashed potatoes. Obviously neither one of us had any idea what to do with the graham cracker cause he ended up with a sprinkle of graham cracker on his, too.

Lucas' apple chicken deliciousness with mashed potatoes

The second basket was our entree round and included white rice, pork stew meat, cream cheese, and baby carrots. I'd never had pork like this before but I feel like I will incorporate it more into my food. Pork is so much better for you than beef. 

Entree Basket

I cooked the pork and carrots, and then heated up some cream of mushroom soup with added cream cheese. I then mixed this all with rice. I liked it a lot but it looked kinda blah and wasn't very creative. I basically just mixed everything together.

Kristina's cheesy pork and rice casserole

 Here's an action shot of Lucas because I got done a bit early.

Lucas' entree was kinda a pork stir fry with carrots and green peppers and onion which he put over rice. He used the cream cheese to make cream cheese corn which was very good. I was really surprised with how well we both did. Both of our dishes were edible and pretty tasty.

Lucas' pork stir fry and cream cheese corn

And finally the dessert round. I was most excited about this round. I love all the ingredients and was curious if the idea in my head would translate to the plate haha. Our ingredients: popcorn, peanut butter, pie crust, canned peaches. I realized after this round that they all started with "p." Oops haha

Dessert Basket

Since I had pie crust and peaches, my first thought was peach pie, but I didn't have enough peaches for a whole pie and I wanted to be a bit more creative. So, I made heart shaped peach pie empanadas. I just want to say that they were DElicious. I WILL be making them again. Yum. I then cooked the popcorn and make a peanut butter cinnamon drizzle. I left some of the peanut butter drizzle on the plate for dipping. Yum. 

Kristina's peach pie empanadas with peanut butter drizzled popcorn

Throughout this whole round I could not figure out where Lucas was going while he was cooking, he had so many things going on at once haha. What it turned out to be was peanut butter coated popcorn pie with a peach marshmallow icing. Sound good? I didn't think so either. Boy was I wrong. I ate like a fourth of this thing and that was after I ate my dessert. I even tried to get some out of the fridge the next day...it didn't refrigerate very well. But still. It was good. 

Lucas' popcorn peanut butter peach pie

This was so much more fun than even I thought it was going to be. I think that it made both of us a little more confident about our cooking because we both did so well. While we had full intentions of having a winner, we declared a tie. It is Valentine's day after all. I won appetizer, he won entree, and we tied the dessert.

-Kristina

January

January went way to fast. I feel like I didn't have an extra moment to spare for blogging. But now I will blog over all the wonderful things that happened in January.

I started subbing. I sub almost every day and while it is not what I want to do for the rest of my life, I do actually kind of enjoy it. The kids at all the schools I sub at are starting to recognize me and say hi to me in the hallways. It's really cool to me that even as a sub I am able to build at least small relationships with the students. Because I haven't been in the same classroom twice, I am able to get lots of ideas from lots of different classrooms. It's so interesting to me to see the different ways that the teachers run their classroom and set everything up. I'm even more anxious to have my own classroom now though. So I'm really needing a job. =)

Lucas and I have made a huge effort to get involved at Sunnybrook Christian Church. I thought that it was going to be really hard for me to find a new church family and fit in but it hasn't been at all. We've joined a lifegroup, we attend the college age bible study, and we go to church Wednesday nights for the adult services. I think we are going to probably cut out the Wednesday nights because 3 nights a week is a little too much for our busy schedule. But the point is, we have been very welcomed. We placed our membership last weekend and this weekend we went on a retreat with the college age group. It was a lot of fun! We're really starting to get to know everyone. 

On January 20th, Lucas and I got to celebrate our 2 month anniversary. Sometimes it feels like so much longer than that but most of the time I'm just so surprised that we are married now. I love it so much. We have a lot of fun together I think. On the 29th we celebrated being together for 4.5 years. That's a long time!

Lucas and I have started trying to work out a lot during the week. It's so hard for us to find time. It's crazy that we're so busy when neither one of us really have full time jobs. Not cool. 

I think I hit all the important parts of January. I'll try to not wait so long before the next post. 

-Kristina