As promised, a wrap-up of our cooking party, which was FABulous!
We asked four of our friends to be contestants. They cooked one at a time. We provided a bunch of ingredients they could all cook with, including a table laden with vegetables, but they each had a mystery bag that included three mystery ingredients. Once they looked at the ingredients and had a couple minutes to think about it, we started a timer for 40 minutes. (They were allowed to finish up the last couple things for a couple minutes after; we were much more lenient than the show we based this on.)
The first person had grass jelly juice (a drink we found in the Vietnamese grocery store), refrigerated crescent rolls and mushy peas (a standard British veggie).
He decided to make an Indian-spiced mixture with the peas and roll them up in the crescent rolls.
Then he served them with a dipping sauce that incorporated the grass jelly drink.
The next contestant had amaretto liqueur, fruit strip snacks and wasabi roasted peas.
He made a pesto pasta with amaretto and wasabi peas in the sauce, and a gazpacho soup sweetened with fruit strips.
The third person got nori (seaweed) sheets, tomatillos and Diet Cherry Coke.
She made sushi (using Minute Rice!):
She incorporated the tomatillos into the rice and Diet Cherry Coke into the dipping sauce.
The last contestant's mystery ingredients were frozen shelled edamame, BBQ Pringles and HP Sauce (a British condiment similar to steak sauce).
She put the edamame in a vegetable salad with a creamy onion dressing, and made a dip that used the HP sauce to dip the Pringles in. She also made crostini for dipping.
Although we knew our friends liked to cook, I thought the mystery ingredients would be way too hard, but they did an amazing job! Everything tasted and looked great. We had the rest of the guests rank their favorites in taste, presentation, creativity and overall favorite and handed out presents. As it happened there was pretty much one winner in each category (well, two people more or less tied for Taste, but one of them won the Overall category, so I gave the Taste prize to the other one). We awarded kitchen gadgets for each category and also gave each contestant a bottle of wine.
Not a frugal party, although we'll be able to incorporate the unused ingredients into our menu for the next week. But it was SO much fun! I'm really pleased that our friends stepped up to the plate. A couple of them said they were surprisingly nervous beforehand and that the clock was nerve-wracking, but that it was kind of a rush to figure out something delicious and make it.
Cook-off party!
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Thrifty Ray, besides the four contestants and the four of us, there were about eight other guests. Not everyone could stay for the voting; I think there were four other guests plus us. We have a small place with an open kitchen, so it seemed plenty bustling with the chefs cooking like mad and everyone else chatting!
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