As promised, and only a day late, here is the result of our latest Chopped Challenge at home. Basket ingredients, as you know, we Cactus Paddles, Mango and Walleye.
Disclaimer—this was only semi-successful. We found out none of us enjoy cactus. At all. If you like cactus, then you’d probably really like the entire dish. I surely did not! After the hype, I feel a little bad. You were probably expecting something fantastic. It’s not always fantastic. That’s life. But it sure did look pretty.
I ended up making blackened walleye and mango salad over grilled cacti. The salad and walleye were extremely delicious! Like for real. So yummy!
My favorite was the mango salad. It helped balance out the heat from the blackened fish. Fish was good. A bit spicy for me, but I am a spice baby. The guys and kid liked the spice.
The mango salad was easy. Although next time I will buy precut mangos. Peeling and slicing was not as easy as you may think. I made a quick dressing with lime juice, sugar, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Once I had the mango sliced, or what resembled slices, I grilled them. Then I tossed with the dressing and fresh basil, cilantro, and red onion. Sooooo good!
For the blackened walleye I dipped the fillets in melted butter and then coated with seasoning. The seasoning mix was paprika, dry mustard, cayenne, cumin, black pepper, white pepper, thyme, and salt. Next time I will go lighter on the cayenne and pepper. I put into cast iron that had been preheating on the grill on high heat. Once it was “blackened” I moved the fillets to the upper rack to finish cooking. The end result was flaky white fish coated in flavor packed crisp.
Cactus was a lot of work for something that really didn’t turn out well. I spent a lot of time removing the little prickles. Not nearly as easy as You Tube made it out to be! I tried using a veggie peeler, but that got slimed up too quick to really do any good. I ended up using a paring knife and that took forever. Keep in mind, I was trying to get these on the grill before the rain started. When cleaned and safe to eat I tossed in olive oil and sprinkled with cumin and salt. Onto the grill they went at medium high heat.
Cactus tastes like slimy trees. It was good to try and find out we didn’t enjoy. You never know til you try. And not all Chopped Challenges are successes. It is ok to fail and learn from it. Regardless, it was a lot of fun to try new techniques and food. We were still hungry later; I threw together some tuna melts and we went to bed with full bellies. Always good to have a backup plan.
I will make the fish with mango salad again. Those two items were winners!
Enough about food. Let’s talk gardening. What are your plans for this season? I am hoping to have some gardening projects done soon to post about. I can’t wait to share!
