Chopped: Emotional Eating Edition

Sometimes, we need to just eat our feelings. Especially when we have some really cruddy days.

A few of my girlfriends were just having the hardest of weeks, and so what better solution than to love them in one of the best ways I could: whipping up a five-course meal. I asked each of the four them to give me ingredients they craved, and from there I went into Food Network’s “Chopped” mode and took time to craft a meal. I had much more time and less pressure to do so than on the actual show, but still definitely the same sweaty face.

The requests were as follows: cheese, peaches, crepes, asparagus, and salmon. This is where the fun came. How can I make an exciting meal that still comforted the soul? Where they wouldn’t feel like crap after eating it, but still ate to their heart’s content? That the meal would still somehow flow in kaiseki fashion? And I could also kind of selfishly try out some new recipes on them?

Roll montage of papers of ideas flying in the air and grocery store shopping.

And so birthed THIS MENU:

And here are the noms for the evening:

It was a rather successful composition, a symphony of the best sounds this world has to offer: sizzling, frying, searing, chopping and whisking over a bed of hearty laughter and clinking glasses.