My Own Chopped Challenge at Home: Using Leftovers and the Pantry

If you are a fan of The Food Network and Chopped you may be familiar with the Chopped Challenge at Home happening on Instragram and Twitter during this quarantine. The Chopped judges have been challenged to take food from their pantries and make a meal and also have encouraged others to post their meals . You can learn about it here.

I decided to do my own personal Chopped Challenge at home today with leftovers and pantry items. I am just posting it here and not entering the competition. This is what I found in my "basket":

Leftover sausage gravy from when I prepared biscuits and gravy

left over Manwich Sloppy Joe meat and sauce

whipped cream cheese that needed to be used

From my pantry  I used part of a jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce, 

and a dry herb mix.I mixed it all together and let it simmer on the stove.

From the pantry and fridge I cooked penne pasta, topped the pasta with parmesan cheese, and served it with a Caesar salad in the bag. 

Here was the final presentation.

"The ingredients in this dish sounded disgusting, but you know what? I really liked it".Chris Santos

"It was like sausage gravy and Manwich had a baby and it was enhanced with cream cheese. Great use of the basket ingredients" Alex Guarnaschelli

" Your pasta was cooked perfectly! I can't stop eating it." Scott Conant

" Not too shabby!" guest judge Everett Jolley

What did I think? The sauce was tasty. It reminded me of Campbell's tomato soup that you added cream instead of milk or water. I will probably never be able to duplicate it, but I used up lots of  leftovers and food that needed to be eaten.

Focusing on Kindness

With everthing going on in the world right now, it is important to focus on kindness. Signs of kindness show up every day in big ways with restaurants delivering food to health workers and landlords paying rent for their tenants. Signs of kindness show up every day in small ways with signs to teachers, encouraging words, and taking time to check on neighbors. This has always been one of my favorite poems. Today it seems appropriate.

Kindness

• 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.