Before we started doing Whole 30, The Husband and I loved watching the Food Network. Now, of course, it’s a little like torture. I just can’t bring myself to watch our beloved Bobby Flay make one more waffle with bruléed bananas on top, no matter how darn cute he is. (I’m not alone on this one. The Husband has a pretty big man crush on him, too.)

But our absolute favorite show is “Chopped” – where the contestants get a basket of four wacky ingredients and have to make a gourmet dish out of them in a certain amount of time.

From time to time, when my dinner routine has become … well, routine, I will play my own game of Chopped with whatever I’ve got on hand in my fridge and pantry. I’ll take a protein and veggies and some cooking staples and try to make some sort of complete meal out of them.

Last night I took my Chopped game to the Whole 30 cookbook. I had chicken thighs in my fridge, a shit ton of sweet potatoes, and lots of greens. In the poultry section I found a recipe called Melissa’s Chicken Hash, which looked pretty darn good. It called for boneless chicken thighs (Check!), one sweet potato (Check!), spinach (Check!), a granny smith apple (Amazingly, check!), red pepper flakes (Check!) and walnuts (Nope! But I did have cashews. Close enough…).

Perfect, right?

Ha.

My brain was kinda on another planet, so things were off to a rocky start from the get-go. I forgot to cut the chicken into smaller pieces before throwing them in the pan. And in the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t realize we were out of walnuts until I’d already prepped every other ingredient and the chicken was in the pan. I had to grab our container of mixed nuts and frantically fish out all the cashews.

After only a few steps, it began to sink in that my dish wasn’t going to look anything like the picture in the book. Melissa, please.

Here’s the comparison. It’s pretty obvious which is which.

One thing that made a big difference is that I don’t have a veggie spiralizer, which – although it doesn’t explicitly spell out in the text – I’m pretty sure that’s how the picture looked as good as it did. I used a box grater to grate the sweet potato, so it came out pretty mushy after being cooked.

The Chopped judges score the contestants on taste, use of basket ingredients, and appearance. I failed miserably on appearance. But The Husband gave me a thumbs up on the taste. I think he said something like, “If you didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, it would be really good.”

Yep.

Note: This is a re-post from the Tumblr version of this blog. It originally ran on April 5, 2016.