Chopped!

We love watching the cooking show "Chopped". We recently introduced it to our kids and they loved it. They've been such good sports with all of my health stuff and we thought it would be fun to have a little "Chopped" competition with the kids. You would have thought it was Christmas Eve. They were so excited all day long. They were just dying to know what the mystery ingredients were! 

 It was tricky deciding on the mystery ingredients since we had a couple experienced chefs and one not as experienced. We decided to not make it too hard this first time. The mystery ingredients were: chocolate chips, strawberries, pistachios and nilla wafers.

 I can't explain how enjoyable it was to watch our kids run around the kitchen trying to make up the best dessert. They had just about every kitchen gadget out! They all took it so seriously.

 They always do this pose on the show when the buzzer goes off. You can't touch your plate once the timer goes off!

 They had names for their desserts and I'm forgetting them at the moment. Probably because one was a really long Hobbit name. They were all wonderful! Sadie melted chocolate and then froze little swirled discs. It was a fun touch to her plate!

 Ash made a strawberry jam/syrup to go over her dish. I loved her chocolate shavings.

 The girls definitely won the "presentation" aspect but Nate won overall (he could hardly believe he could beat his older sisters!). Transforming the mystery ingredients is a big deal on the show and we thought Nate did the most transforming of each ingredient. He made a toffee/chocolate/pistachio mix with crunched up Nilla wafers. It was actually really tasty! He served a strawberry/chocolate smoothie that was surprisingly not as sweet as we expected to be.

 We had so much fun, that the kids decided to give us a chopped challenge! They loved going to the store without me to pick out the mystery ingredients. They kept saying we were going to just die when we saw them. While trying to get them to spill the beans on the mystery ingredients, I guessed sardines and I thought I was right with their reations. And yes, that sounded awful! So we were both pretty surprised that our ingredients didn't seem quite as bad. The worst part was SPAM. Yep, we used SPAM, powdered donuts, marshmallow cream and that disgusting easy cheese in a can. We had so much fun cooking!

 I made a rosemary buscuit (with crushed donuts), fruit salad (with the marshmallow cream) and a SPAM/pasta dish with a homemade cream sauce (and the easy cheese).

 Dave creamed me with his dish. Dave had a hash brown cake with eggs and a cream sauce.

The judges said my biscuit was too dry and they liked how all of Dave's ingredients were piled into one dish. The paper in front of them had a list of "chopped appropriate" comments. Earlier, they watched the show and took notes of things to say while commenting/judging.