Chapter 1: What cooking challenge is presented in this episode?
Today will be my most difficult cooking challenge yet. I'll be competing against my girlfriend, Isabelle. We'll have three rounds consisting of an appetizer, entree, and dessert. But there's just one thing. Isabelle, how often do you cook?
Chapter 2: How does the cooking competition between Nick and Isabelle begin?
Never. Never. So I'm giving Isabelle a huge advantage in each round to level the playing field. If I lose, I'll take her on a one-week luxury vacation to any destination of her choosing. But if I win, I don't think I'll have a girlfriend for much longer.
Let's cook.
Round one will be an appetizer round, and I will be blindfolded. I'll be making what I call a blindfolded Bloomin' Onion. And it's certainly not gonna be easy, but I'm gonna give it my best shot.
Today, I'm gonna be making a poke bowl. So I've made poke bowls before, but never with a full salmon here. I don't really know how to approach this. Look at him. So cute.
For the Bloomin' Onion, I'm gonna chop off the head of the onion. And the idea is we want the onion to look like this. So I'm gonna chop down all of the sides of this onion, being very, very careful with my fingers as I do it. And when I feel like I've gone all the way through, I'll open the onion up and hope that it holds together.
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Chapter 3: What dish does Nick prepare for the appetizer round?
The key now for me is gonna be to make the batter for my Bloomin' Onion. We need this to be extremely flavorful, especially because the judge I'm trying to impress today is none other than my cameraman, Manny. Manny has been locked in a soundproof room and has no idea who has cooked each dish.
I feel like I'm doing this, you know, semi-correctly. And our first piece. Got some scales in there, we'll fix that later. Now, I'm gonna try to get the skin off here. Okay, this is a bit harder than I anticipated.
Chapter 4: How does Isabelle approach her poke bowl dish?
I feel like they make it look so easy when they do it.
I'm so incredibly grateful that I can't see what the salmon looks like, because I think I'd have a heart attack. To season up my Bloomin' Onion batter here, I don't know exactly what I've got in my hands, but I'll do my best to just sprinkle in an even amount of all of them. I'm thinking we're probably well-seasoned enough, so I'm gonna go ahead and whisk it all up and set this aside.
The last step of my Bloomin' Onion is making the wet batter. I gotta do this by just pure feel. Come on. Come on. Nice. Then I'll follow this with two eggs. After a nice quick whisk, our wet batter is complete.
So I'm going to start here with the cucumbers. Oh, that was a good throw.
What the is going on?
Now we're going to slice up our mango, and then we're going to cut into little cubes. Looking good. Now I'm going to cut the avocado. Honestly, not.
Our very last step is to dredge this Bloomin' Onion. So first, I'll coat the whole thing in flour and really try to work into every nook and cranny on my onion. Once I've done my first dredge, I'll toss it into the wet batter and move it around as much as possible to fully coat the whole onion. So far, I'm feeling really good about this round.
To finish, back once more in my dry batter where I really need to open up every single petal here. I'll shake off all that excess flour and my Bloomin' Onion is ready to cook. For safety, since I'll be using hot oil, I'm gonna keep my blindfold off the rest of this round. So let's get back to cooking. To finish this up, my bloomin' onion is gonna go straight into the frying oil.
And now I have to give it the love and care that it deserves.
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Chapter 5: What are the cooking strategies used in the entree round?
Probably the toughest part is that this is all we've got to bake things. This is the smallest container ever. For dessert, I'll be making a blueberry crisp. I'll start with some brown sugar, then a nice drizzle of melted butter, and I'll mix this all up.
Now, in with some all-purpose flour, and also a little bit of regular sugar, and of course, a nice little splash of our homemade vanilla extract. And once I've mixed this up once more, I'll go ahead and add in some of these blueberry oats. Now, I just wanna mush this together so that we begin to get that nice crumbly form.
I'll spray my baking dish, now down with some of these frozen blueberries, and I'll top this all off with my crumble. This is ready to go into our oven. You gotta be kidding me. It looks like to fit this, I'm gonna have to press it down as best I can. Then we can go in. That's good.
All right, we're gonna try to shape this into more of a dough with our hands and then add the chocolate chips. And we made them pretty big so that they can fit the ice cream inside. Okay, now that we have our three cookies, we're gonna stick them in the oven. In we go. We got here some blue ice cream.
We're going to fill up this mold here and try to get a perfect circle with the ice cream to fit in between the cookies. I got to work fast because it's already melting out here on the bottom. So we're going to stick this in the freezer while we wait for the cookies to finish. Got a lot of meat in here. It's bulking season.
I'm at the point where I want to check on this. So we're supposed to push it all the way through. And then you stick this in. Theoretically, I can just pick it up and pull it out. Oh. That is not cooked at all. I'm convinced this thing is pretty much doing absolutely nothing. This is about all I can do.
To plate my dessert, I'll first go down with a few scoops of my beautiful blueberry crumble, which I must say, turned out better than I thought, but is not quite as crispy as I wanted it to be. I guess that's what happens when you cook in an Easy-Bake oven.
Then I'm gonna go ahead and take a nice scoop of my vanilla ice cream, which is gonna go right on top of my tart, and we'll finish it with some nice, fresh lemon zest. Maybe a little blueberry juice on top to finish.
It's time to plate the dessert. I'm gonna cut around the edge here and make sure it comes out nicely. Stick the other cookie right on top here. Kinda like an open mouth. And then for the finishing touch, we're gonna stick two eyes made from white chocolate right on the top. And here we have our Cookie Monster ice cream sandwich.
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