food challenge: #4 !

Let me just say, its been a crazy month.

And let me apologize to you (and mostly to the Springles) for slacking on posting our last food challenge. We literally cooked this meal eons ago. Literally. We cooked food challenge #5 this week (post to come soon-ish) and I am just getting around to posting #4. Shame on me.

Anyway, as many of you know – Nich and I have a friendly little cooking challenge with our good friends Taylor and Brittany, who live in Long Beach, CA. We blindly pick 4 random ingredients that we must incorporate into a coherent (and delicious) meal. We then post the pictures & descriptions of the meal here and have you tell us which one you think is best (and why). We wish that all of you could taste our meals, but alas…you can’t! So you’ll have to look and read and tell us what you think.

For this challenge, we drew these 4 ingredients:
Ground Turkey
Blueberries
Spinach
Polenta

Right off the bat, I will admit that I wasn’t thrilled about ground turkey. I don’t particularly like ground turkey, and I don’t often choose to cook with ground turkey. But, such is the luck of the draw. We pondered how these 4 ingredients could possibly work together, and this is what we came up with:

Nich & Lindsay’s meal was:

Blueberry Sausage & Spinach Benedict – For whatever reason, Nich and I immediately had the idea to do breakfast – we loved the idea of making our own turkey breakfast sausage. So, we made our own maple blueberry turkey breakfast sausage patties (seasoned with fennell seeds, cinnamon, allspice, salt&pepper, blueberries, and maple syrup). We set the sausage on a bed of sauteed spinach (with a hint of salt, pepper, cayenne and lemon) and used a seared polenta cake as our base (instead of an english muffin). We poached farm fresh eggs & whipped a zingy (homemade!) hollandaise sauce to top off the benedict. Overall, this had the classic benedict components (poached egg & hollandaise) but the blueberry turkey sausage, spinach, and polenta made it feel like a whole new creation. The sausage tasted as good (if not better) than anything you’d get at your favorite breakfast joint. It was grubbin. While it may not be the fanciest meal we’ve ever made, it definitely tasted great. Plus, I (Lindsay) felt like Julia Child – making homemade hollandaise. I whipped those yolks into perfection!

Taylor & Brittany’s meal was:
Grit Burgers- Our double decker burgers started with baked grits buns. They had ground turkey patties which were well seasoned. On each layer they had smoked gouda cheese and a blueberry-tomatillo aioli. One layer had fresh spinach leaves while the other had roasted banana peppers. The burgers were served with a fresh salad of spinach, apples, sundried tomatoes and a blueberry vinaigrette. They were yummy city! The combination of flavors was full, but light as there was a nice combination of spicy and cool.