Would I be Chopped?

I watch a lot of Food Network in my spare time and when I was growing up. Family time when I was growing up always consisted of eating, cooking or watching cooking shows. This was the start of my predilection for food, cooking and eating—I love to read about food, I love to cook and I love to eat.

Whenever I watch the Food Network "Chopped", I have to wonder to myself, "Would I be chopped?" I wonder. I always like to think about what I would do with the ingredients and whether or not it would work together. For this episode, the first set of ingredients were Macadamia nuts, oysters and apricots. Granted its kind of like cheating, but I always thinks of a different dish after seeing what they do. However, I think I would have been able to put together a fried oyster with Macadamia nut coating and an apricot chutney. Sounds good yeah? I would take the nuts and ground them up and add it to some batter of flour, add some pepper and little bit of milk. the chutney would be made with the apricots, some caramelized onions, brown sugar and a some orange juice. I think that would work out. The presentation would be simple: fried oysters placed in trio, or a triangle, with the chutney pooled under it or drizzled over it. Mmmmm? Perhaps.

The second round for the entree was buttermilk, pork loin, and jackfruit. Crazy right? We eat jackfruit, but usually in a Halo Halo, a Filipino version of the snowcone–so that was a hard one to think of... Or to be completely honest, I'm not sure if I've thought of one yet.

For the dessert, the three ingredients were chocolate, sugar cookie dough, figs and yellow miso paste. That's right, miso paste, otherwise known as soybean paste for soup. Hmmmm. I got nothing on that. But the contestants came up with pretty good ideas. One contestant made a chocolate pudding (though it didn't set up right because there wasn't enough time), with caramelized figs and miso sugar cookies or wafers. I think the other contestant tried to make a sort of Napoleon, a French dessert with layers of puff pastry and cream filling, out of the cookie dough, miso filling, figs and chocolate. I don't think I could have come up with a dessert with those specific components. I think I've only had figs fresh, and that was only once, a long, long time ago.

At least I know I could have come up with a rad appetizer—at least I think it would have been rad. Who knows? I'll just have to make it one of these days.