Lettuce, tortilla chips, lime and corn

Dinner: Lettuce, tortilla chips, lime and corn

Chef: Tristan

I decided to add lettuce, lime and corn to a recipe I make often. My mother learned the recipe from Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America years ago, so the dish is known as “Charlie” in our house. Charlie is essentially a tortilla chip and bean casserole.

I cooked the corn, made some tomato sauce, added the lime juice and hot sauce to the tomato sauce. I mixed in the corn and the lettuce, added some beans and poured that over the chips. That went into the oven at 350 for about 30 minutes. Normally I would add enchilada sauce to the dish as well, but decided the hot sauce in my tomato sauce would add enough kick.

Because I felt like I was cheating a little bit I decided I should try and use the ingredients in something that I hadn’t made before. Seeing I had a lot of lettuce left over a salad seemed like the obvious choice. I made a lime dressing, threw in some corn and crumbled tortilla chips and served that next to the Charlie.

 

Dessert: persimmons, mandarin oranges, organic sucane, brie

Chef Monica

Picked by Tristan

Let me start off by saying, we started this challenge not knowing what a ripe persimmon looks like. A ripe persimmon is squishy. Squishier than you think it should be. Ours were hard. But let’s move on.

The sucane was some raw sugar stuff that I decided needed to be baked into something. 

I used the food processor (our new favorite kitchen tool.) and whipped up a quick little crust. Just flour, sugar and COLD butter. I shoved the crust into mini muffin tins and threw them into the fridge just for a few minutes to set the butter cold again. Then into the oven.

The crusts were not exactly what I was hoping for. The butter chunks were a little too large in ratio to the mini muffin tin. Meh. I cut what I thought were small pieces of brie, threw those into the crusts and added a piece of persimmon and a mandarin slice. Back into the oven to melt the brie.

The end result was not bad. Honestly, I thought it was going to fall apart and taste like raw flour. The biggest problem was the brie was very overwhelming. I needed half the brie and twice the fruit. The persimmon was still raw after everything was said and done.