My last roommate was a huge fan of the Food Network channel, and as such, I watched a good bit myself. In the end, I wound up falling in love with the show Chopped. For those not familiar, it’s a competition cooking show with four professional chefs competing.  They have to make an appetizer in 20 minutes, then a main course in 30 minutes, and then a dessert in 30 minutes. However, after each course, the dishes are judged, by three other chefs, and a competitor is “chopped” or removed from the competition. So by the time you hit the dessert round it’s between two people. Now here’s the catch. Each round contains a mystery basket that contains 4 ingredients that must be incorporated into the dish. Sometimes they’re perfectly normal ingredients like rack of lamb or red wine. Other times they’re fun things like fruit cocktail or Cheetos. Half the fun is watching the look of horror on the chefs’ faces when they pull out the mystery basket ingredients. It’s good times.

Because of this show, I now play Chopped in my kitchen on occasion. Not with a mystery basket per se, but when I really need to go grocery shopping and have nothing left but random ingredients in my kitchen, I’ll pick out 4 and see what I can come up with. I usually wind up with something that’s not great, but it’s okay. The fact that I didn’t have to leave my house to go grocery shopping makes it even better. Occasionally I will come up with pure gold and the new dish enters my normal cooking rotation. But every now and then I create something that isn’t quite god-awful, but pretty close.

Whenever this happens I am then faced with an existential dilemma. On the one hand, I kind of prefer my food to taste good. Strange, I know. On the other hand, I really don’t like wasting food and I’m also not made of money. Therefore, do I toss the crap food and buy something to replace it, or do I suck it up, eat it and vow to never put those foods together ever again? Sad to say, the “not made of money” part of the equation gets the biggest vote, which is why I spent all of last week eating a very strange concoction.

Needless to say, I am all sorts of excited to go grocery shopping and have dinners that actually taste good this week. One of these days I will learn to go grocery shopping before I run out of food. Some day. Oh, FYI – rice pasta is NOT interchangeable with rice.