Iron Chef

Tonight our community of foreign teachers held an Iron Chef competition. I had planned on attending to watch the showdown. But this morning, Christi asked if I would take her place as she wasn't feeling well. Sure, I said, I'll step in to do some chopping or whatever.

I showed up, and was briefed. Shortly after, we got started, and boy… did things get going. It was girls vs. boys. We had a host, four judges, a small crowd, and two teams of four chefs. The competition was 60 minutes and it was intense from the get go. The secret ingredient was sweet potatoes.

I couldn't tell you exactly what the guys made. There was a smoothie they served in hollowed out sweet potato cups. A coleslaw of sorts, fried chicken with something and sweet potato chips I think…. Oh, and their team name was "food dudez"

Our team name was "KAL" …. which stands for kick-ass ladies, of course!! We made a sweet potato soup with a croquette and fetta cheese garnish, grilled pork with sweet potato and white potato au gratan with a vinaigrette sauce, and for dessert we had a plate swirled with carmel and a sweet potato tartlet with honey whip cream on top. We didn't get to eat much of it while we were running around crazy, but we tasted everything during clean up and …. YUM!!!! (don't worry folks I have the recipes… I'll make dinner sometime) My role was to peel a bunch of potatoes.. obviously. Then, I put the crust into the tartlet tins, dices carrots, and cut green onions. I made the whip cream from scratch… aka I beat whipping cream. I dished up the soup, and I dolloped the whip cream on the tartlets at the end. (Twig: tartlets…. tartlets…. tartlets….. word has lost all meaning)

The judges totaled up the points after we served them our dishes. It was close. Out of a possible 60 points, the boys had a total of 44.7 points…. And unfortunately, us girls has a total of 49.8.


Yes, that's right, WE WON!!!  We didn't win anything other than pride and bragging rights, but that's all we needed. I just had so much fun cooking with people I had met, but hadn't really interacted with much. Uh… It was a great night.

Plus, we made such a mess!! While cooking, and scurrying about I didn't notice, but afterwards, when we started to clean all four of gals just marveled at how messy we made our station of 5 tables. I was pretty proud of that mess.

The best part just occurred. We had left over tartlet ingredients and my neighbor across the hall was going to make a pie and save me a piece. Well, turns out her family doesn't eat wheat flour, so she made the pie, and just brought it over for me. (I got the extra honey whip cream too) I can't wait to eat it!!

Ahhhhhh… the Meghs is happy.

Until next time.

P.S. We did have a photographer… I'll have picture update when I can.