Chopped: A Guilty Pleasure

Ok, so to start off, we've had a challenging spring. Bruce broke his ankle on a double black diamond slope at the top of Stratton Mountain on day 3 of a 4 day ski trip. Thus ended the ski season, and the vacation.

Then, I had abdominal surgery, taking me out of commission for several weeks, and leaving both of us impaired and housebound.  We're on the flip side now, and life should start to return to some semblance of normal within the next two weeks.

What does all this have to do with Epicurean Dimensions? On the surface, not much. We've been eating well, due to the freezer full of healthy meals that we spent last summer preparing. Nothing new in the kitchen.

Being housebound and somewhat immobile has meant that I needed to find low-impact entertainment. Enter Hulu...the online way to watch TV shows. And it was there that I discovered "Chopped".

Here's the description of the show from the Wikipedia entry:

"In each episode, four chefs compete. Their challenge is to take a mystery basket of ingredients and turn them into a dish that is judged on their creativity, presentation, and taste with minimal time to plan and execute.^[1][2] The show is divided into three rounds: "Appetizer", "Entrée", and "Dessert". In each round, the chefs are given a basket containing between three and five (usually four) ingredients, and the dish each competitor prepares must contain each of those ingredients. The ingredients are often ones which are not commonly prepared together. For example, in "Yucca, Watermelon, Tortillas," the episode which originally aired on February 10, 2009, the appetizer course baskets contained watermelon, canned sardines, pepper jack cheese, and zucchini.

The competitors are given access to a pantry and refrigerator stocked with a wide variety of other ingredients. Each round has a time limit: twenty minutes for the Appetizer round (thirty minutes in some season one episodes), and thirty minutes for the Entrée and Dessert rounds (some episodes gave the chefs 40 or 45 in the entrée round to allow them to handle whole large poultry, e.g. turkeys, geese, or ducks; another gave the chefs fifty minutes in the dessert round). The chefs must cook their dishes and complete four platings (one for each judge plus one "beauty plate") before time runs out. After each round, the judges critique the dishes based on presentation, taste, and creativity. The judges then decide which chef is "chopped," that is, eliminated from the competition. Thus, by the dessert round, only two chefs remain. When deciding the winner, the judges consider not only the dessert course, but the entire meal presented by each chef as a whole. The winner receives $10,000."

The Chopped Judges are notable chefs, restauranteurs, food critics and cookbook authors of acclaim.  The pace of the show is fast, and each episode has potential for a high degree of creativity (and some culinary disasters....).  I'm fascinated by how the contestant chefs make instant decisions, jump in and start working with bizarre combinations of ingredients: gingerbread and live lobsters....oysters and lemon candy...nopales and quahogs...the list goes on and on.

Tempers flare, drama ensues, and the formulaic verbiage of host Ted Allen gets old quickly...but overlooking these minor annoyances, I find the show to be an interesting and engaging diversion during my recovery.