Going into my second year as Editorial Director of Spoon University at UF and third year being in Spoon, I decided this was the year to learn how to cook. Yes, I love writing about food and restaurants, I love eating food, but I really cannot cook. Cooking in college has always felt daunting to me. I’ve often described it to friends like this; some people can only see the letters on the page and struggle to put sentences together. It’s the same thing for me with cooking. I can see all the individual ingredients, just not the meals that could come from them. After I explained that, I realized that college is literally Chopped.
You have a bunch of random ingredients in your cupboard, about an hour of time between classes to cook, and the anxiety that pairs perfectly with it all. I had Tori, the Spoon UF Photography Director and the photographer who paired up with me on this article, choose four random ingredients from my kitchen to kick off the first-ever Spoon UF Chopped: College Edition.
The Mystery Basket Ingredients
Tori chose canned chickpeas, banana chips, cilantro, and taco sauce as my four “basket” ingredients. The rules of the game were simple and familiar; using other staple ingredients in your kitchen, make a meal featuring all four ingredients. Since I was making the rules myself, I decided I didn’t have to completely transform the ingredients like in Chopped.
My Plan
After pacing my kitchen in a panicked stroll, I decided to make Chipotle-inspired cilantro lime rice, which used one of the mystery basket ingredients of cilantro. After I had the rice going, I thought about what I normally eat rice with. I looked in my fridge and saw I had small tortillas; I could make tacos.
Cooking The Shiz
With Tori’s very helpful suggestion, I added garlic powder, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper to the chickpeas I had drained and was roasting on the stove. While the chickpeas and rice were cooking, I was pulling out all the toppings for the tacos. I got shredded sharp cheddar cheese, feta cheese, pickled onions that I thankfully had in the fridge, and of course the taco sauce. My only qualm were the stupid banana chips. What was I to do with them?
The Final Result
In the end, I ended up drizzling the taco sauce over top of one taco and crushed the banana chips and topped them on the other taco. And I still had no idea how they were going to taste.
Chopped: Final Elimination Round
If I were reading this article I’m not sure I would believe this, but the tacos were actually really amazing and ended up being vegetarian. If it weren’t for this challenge, I would’ve never thought to use chickpeas as my main protein in the taco. Honestly, I would recommend this recipe to any college students, and I think it serves as a good reminder that you can literally make anything from what you have in your kitchen/dorm. Just pretend you’re in Chopped and get creative with it.