The "Grounded" Gourmet

The last month of my life has been dedicated to moving.  Sorting.  Packing.  Changing our Address.  Cleaning the old house.  Unpacking.  Organizing the new house.  I am tired of boxes.  So tired of boxes.

So when Wyokiddo was napping the last two days, I boycotted doing anything related to unpacking and watched the Food Network.  It was heavenly.  Today, I watched the Pioneer Woman, Trisha Yearwood and Chopped.  Two hours of food and not packing.  Delicious!

I’m always entertained by Chopped.  If you’ve never seen it, the show is a cooking competition.  Four contestants are given a basket of ingredients and have to prepare a dish with those ingredients in twenty minutes.  There are three rounds, with one chef being eliminated in each round.

And these are some really random ingredients…today the chefs had Kimchi, gefilte fish, Snowballs, creamed corn, kale chips, bacon-flavored Vodka, apricots and brook trout, among others.  Brook trout I know.  I’m married to Outdoor Guy, after all.  But what, may I ask, is gefilte fish?  Unless that basket includes Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, I’d be out in the first round.

But these chefs were amazingly creative, taking some of those ingredients and reinventing them as a fish cakes, risotto, gremalatta, mousse and even ice cream.  I was wowed by their inventiveness and ability to create deliciousness from the ground up.

Inspired by these gourmets, tonight for dinner, I made my family…drumroll, please…Tater Tot Casserole.  That’s just how I roll.  🙂

Teresa