Iron Chef: UCSD

MASA vs. CKI epicness, with veteran chefs from MASA against the amateur CKI team (in which I was one of the sous-chefs.)

I'll recap the event first before providing more "insider" info on what was going on with our cooking team!

RECAP:
CKI President was the chef. The secret ingredient was "coffee".

We thought we were supposed to make an appetizer, entree, and dessert. At 11:30pm the night before the competition, we found out it was 2 appetizers, 2 entrees, and 1 dessert. Of course, we panicked.

Stayed up until 4 am that night getting prepared.

So Monday, 4:30pm, the chef, the other sous-chef, and I lugged our materials to the UCSD International Center and got ready to face off. The actual cooking started at 5:30pm and lasted until promptly 8:00pm. Three judges critiqued our food with 3 criteria: visuals (how pretty it is), originality (use of secret ingredient), and taste (yum?).

In the end, MASA won...the trophy was a lazy suzie with the competition details painted on it! I think we all did a great job but MASA's past experience with the Iron Chef competition definitely lent them an edge, as well as fancy materials.

Blenders...electric mixers...fancy plates...quite frankly, CKI mixed and mashed everything with a fork and spoon, and as for plates--we were happy we could find 3 plates that looked enough alike to present to the three judges for each of the 5 dishes! I mean, that's a total of 15 matching plates! MASA's dishes were already matching and beautiful without even having any food on it...

What we made:
1. Coffee-Kahlua sweet potatoes
2. Classic Meatballs with Coffee
3. Java Chicken Wings
4. Coffee Pork Loin with Jasmine Rice
5. Kahlua Brownie Explosion with Cappuccino Frozen Yogurt

Stuff they made (not sure exactly what they were, and some of these ingredients are within the same dish): steak with asparagus, yams, mahi-mahi, scallops, and a layered cake. I'm not sure how they afforded all of this, seeing as how our reimbursement budget was only $50...

Funny stuff about the food:
1. We almost made the same steak that they did, instead of our pork loins. Our sous-chef found that exact same recipe online. And at the grocery stores (we went to trader joe's, ralph's, and vons) NONE OF THEM had the right pork loin...we actually bought the wrong kind, and we almost switched over! Good thing our chef decided not to do that!

2. One of our main ingredients was Kahlua, for the yams and the brownies, maybe something else too but that's what I remember. None of the CKI chefs/sous-chefs were over 21 years old, so someone else had to buy it for us!

3. Our sweet potatoes were made primarily by me. Funny thing is, I'm slightly allergic to sweet potatoes, so I never found out what they tasted like; when taste-testing, I'd have to call on someone else! Everyone tells me they were really good, though.

4. The frozen yogurt is Golden Spoon's--where our chef works at!

5. Originally, we had planned to make the chicken wings as appetizer, the pork loin with sweet potatoes as the entree, and the brownie explosion for dessert. When we found out we needed 5 dishes instead of 3, we split up the pork and sweet potatoes and added rice to the pork, and a new dish of meatballs largely improvised by our chef!

6. We had contemplated making our meatballs Mickey-Mouse head shaped, but ultimately decided against it. Seeing as how one of the judges said the meatballs looked like poo, maybe we should have done it after all.

7. For all of our dishes aside from the brownies, we had the same garnish: shredded carrots and different parts of the celery! Why, you ask? Our reimbursement budget was only $50, and we were over as it was! We got very, very creative though!

In the end, I got to spend a lot of time with the chef and got to know her better...and it was a lot of fun even though I'm sleep deprived this entire week so far...I'd love to do it again! But no coffee, please. That was sooo hard to do!