STEAK Challenge Winners Announced!

I’ve always been a proponent of setting a series of small goals in life and checking each one off as I accomplish it and moving on to the next goal. This is what I did:

My first goal was to be the ALL BEING, master of time, space, and dimension.
My next goal was to win the TD cooking challenge.

I’m glad I was lucky enough to win on the one year anniversary of the original challenge.

Once I saw that steak was the challenge ingredient, I was happy. Steak is a tough ingredient in a lot of ways, because a nice, well prepared steak is very impressive, without doing anything to it. It’s so easy to visually taste it. If you grind it up, cover it up, or cut it in small pieces, you take away some of the visual impressiveness of a beautiful piece of meat . Your dish may be great, but visually, you lose something and you have to overcome that. Steak tartare is great, but putting a picture of it next to Big Dropper’s Tomahawk is not fair. So in that way, it’s easy to make a nice looking dish, but it is tough to get too creative with steak as an ingredient. BTW, if BD had just cut that sucker open and let us see the inside, the voting could have gone differently.

This was perfect for me, because I usually make simple dishes where the protein is the star, anyway and don’t do a lot of reimagining with the ingredients. I didn’t want to lose that aura of the MR cooked steak, but wanted to add to it, so surf and turf was a natural. I was thinking either lump crabmeat or shrimp, and chose shrimp, because my sources for lump crabmeat in Indiana are pretty piss poor.

Oh, yeah, and one other benefit is that if you have a spouse who doesn’t like steak, the shrimp and mushrooms in chipotle cream sauce goes great over pasta, too.

Steak is visually impressive, but I am choosing an ingredient that everyone MUST get creative with, if they want to win this next challenge, because visually, it is the opposite of steak. At the same time, it lends itself to creativity, because you can use it in almost anything: sandwiches, casseroles, burritos, soups, pasta, sausage, and in any number of other types of dishes.

GROUND MEAT (can be beef, pork, fowl, or any kind of meat).

This probably hurts me, because I am a simple cook without a lot of special culinary skills, so I expect y’all to ball out on this one…

Great looking dishes!

Oh this next challenge sounds fun!

Congrats, Jax. I don't eat shrimp or mushrooms, but I did vote for you for fist place. That dish looked amazing!

Boo cooks 90% of our meals, so this is an accomplishment for me. He is a good cook! I didn't try his dish because I am the world's pickiest eater and I don't game meat unless its jerky.

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FBD thread representing!

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Are you suggesting a link between alcohol consumption and cooking?

I'm okay with that. I'd be lying if I said I didn't partake while cooking for these challenges...

Yea, I think so. This was during quarantine so I didn't pick up the steaks and honestly my mind is still foggy.

I always make sure to include my wine in the ingredient picture.

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3. HoustonChick86 - Chicken Fried Steak Tacos
4. LSUBoo - Salt Block Elk Steak with Bourbon Butter & Hash

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Pwned

Congrats winners!
(Especially HC86 for beating Boo )

Ground meat should be fun!