Alphabet Meal
If you, like me, are a fan of the show Taskmaster, you might remember the series 1 task where contestants are challenged to cook a meal containing an ingredient for each letter of the alphabet. If it doesn't ring a bell, the episode ("The Last Supper", the series finale!) is available to watch on YouTube.
The original task:
Make the best meal for the Taskmaster using ingredients beginning with every letter of the alphabet. You have a total of two hours. Your time starts now.
Half the fun of Taskmaster is thinking about how you would approach the challenges, so naturally, I watched this challenge and immediately went, "Oooh, I want to give this a try!" However, I did also want to make a meal that would actually taste good, so I did not restrict the amount of time I had to plan and prepare the meal. Also, there's some ambiguity in the wording of the task about whether you can use more than one ingredient starting with the same letter of the alphabet, but I chose to interpret it in the strict sense of one ingredient per letter.
My approach was to tackle the difficult letters first; for example, there's not a ton of ingredients starting with k, q, or x, so I decided that my meal would include kiwi, quick oats, and xanthan gum, and then filled in the easier ingredients from there. Here's my final list of ingredients:
- Apple juice
- Banana
- Coconut milk
- Dark chocolate chunks
- Egg
- Flour
- Gochujang
- Honey
- Italian seasonings
- Jasmine rice
- Kiwi
- Lemon juice
- Mushrooms
- Nutmeg
- Olive oil
- Pesto
- Quick oats
- Raspberries
- Salt
- Tofu
- Unsalted butter
- Vinegar
- Water chestnuts
- Xanthan gum
- Yeast
- Zest of a lemon
The above ingredients can be combined into the following dishes:
- Fruit salad
- Tofu and vegetables in a spicy sauce over rice
- Bread rolls with a lemon pesto dipping sauce
- Oatmeal chocolate chip banana cookies for dessert
- And apple juice to drink!
Not a bad meal, if I say so myself. It turned out very tasty, for the most part. The only thing I wouldn't make again was the pesto dipping sauce; it was a bit much for dipping bread rolls in, though I do enjoy making a somewhat similar lemon/pesto/butter sauce to go over pasta. The best element of the meal was definitely the sauce for the tofu and vegetables. This meal was the first time I had made a sauce with these particular ingredients combined, and it was delicious-- definitely worth a full five points! It has since become a regular in my meal rotation. I do typically use soy sauce as well when cooking tofu, but it's omitted here because it would have conflicted with my S ingredient, salt.
If for some reason you would like to replicate my alphabet meal, I've included a recipe below. (As a side note, writing up this blog post has been a fun excursion into learning about recipe schema markup!) I also highly recommend trying your hand at the alphabet challenge for yourself, it's quite fun!
Alphabet Meal
Ingredients
Fruit salad
- Several kiwis
- Some raspberries
Tofu, vegetables, & rice
- 1 package extra-firm tofu
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 cups jasmine rice
- 1 8-oz. package mushrooms
- 1 8-oz. can sliced water chestnuts
- A pinch of xanthan gum
- 1/4 cup gochujang
- 1 tbsp rice vinegar
- 3 tbsp honey
- Salt to taste
Bread rolls
- 1 1/4 tsp yeast
- 1/2 cup warmed coconut milk
- 1/2 tsp and 1 1/2 tbsp honey, divided
- 2 cups bread flour
- 1 egg
- 1/8 cup olive oil
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp Italian seasonings
Dipping sauce
- 1 tbsp butter
- 2 tbsp pesto
- Juice and zest of 1 lemon
- Dash of Italian seasonings
- Dash of salt
Cookies
- 2 bananas
- 1 cup oats
- 1 tbsp honey
- 1/2 cup choc chunks
- Dash of nutmeg
- Dash of salt
Beverage
- Apple juice
Instructions
Fruit salad
- Peel and chop up the kiwis.
- Mix the sliced kiwi and raspberries together.
Tofu, vegetables, & rice
- Preheat oven to 425F.
- Remove tofu from package, press extra water out, and slice into cubes.
- Coat the tofu cubes in 2 tbsp olive oil and season with salt.
- Place the tofu in a baking dish and bake for about 30 minutes, optionally turning the cubes halfway through.
- Meanwhile, cook rice according to package directions.
- Wash and slice the mushrooms.
- Saute the mushrooms in a little olive oil until they turn a darker brown.
- Meanwhile, mix the sauce ingredients in a small bowl: first stir xanthan gum into 1 tbsp olive oil, then add gochujang, honey, water, and rice vinegar.
- Pour the sauce over the mushrooms, add the water chestnuts, toss thoroughly to coat, and add in the tofu as well when it finishes baking.
- Serve the tofu and vegetables over the rice.
Bread rolls
- Mix yeast, warm milk, and honey in a large bowl and let sit for 5 minutes.
- Add the flour, remaining honey, egg, olive oil, salt, and Italian seasonings to the yeast mixture.
- Mix thoroughly and then knead until it reaches a doughy consistency.
- Grease the bowl with some olive oil and place the dough back in the bowl. Cover and set aside to rise for 1-2 hours or until doubled in volume.
- Preheat oven to 400F.
- Shape dough into rolls and place in a greased baking dish. Cover and let rise until doubled in volume, or about 30 more minutes.
- Bake rolls until golden brown on top, about 20 minutes.
Dipping sauce
- Melt butter.
- Mix pesto, lemon juice and zest, Italian seasonings, and salt into the butter.
Cookies
- Preheat oven to 350F.
- Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
- Mash bananas and mix with oats, honey, nutmeg, and salt until thoroughly combined.
- Mix in the chocolate chunks.
- Spoon cookie dough onto cookie sheet (about 1 tbsp per cookie).
- Bake cookies for about 15 minutes.
Beverage
- Pour yourself a glass of apple juice.