Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Are You Sad - Our Lady Peace
Entry tags:	cooking, life

Iron Chef
Yesterday I participated in an Iron Chef competition. There were 3 teams of 9 people and we were given 2 hours and $70 as resources. We had to prepare a 3 course meal with pumpkin as the "secret" ingredient in each.

We decided to make pumpkin soup as an appetizer, pumpkin polenta with chicken cooked in wine as the entrée and pumpkin fritters in chocolate sauce for dessert. After a quick run to the local grocery store, we got to work using the kitchenware that we'd brought with us. I made the fritters.

ingredients

• 1 cup flour
  
• 2/3 cup whole milk
  
• 2 eggs
  
• 1 tsp canola/sunflower/sesame (but not olive) oil
  
• 1/2 cup dark maple syrup
  
• 1/4 to 1 tsp (as desired) of spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg)
  
• 1 cup pumpkin purée
  

instructions

Mix the flour, eggs and milk together with the oil and whisk until smooth and homogeneous. Let it sit for 30 mins.
Add pumpkin purée, maple syrup and spices. Mix thoroughly.
Heat a liberal quantity of oil in a large frying pan and drop in half-filed ladles of batter to form small round discs.
Flip periodically until golden-brown and use kitchen towel to absorb excess oil.
Serve with chocolate sauce.

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While we were cooking our food one of the other teams realized that their stove wasn't actually producing much heat so we offered to let them share ours. Once most of the food was ready we cleared out a space on our table and laid out all the food, including a lovely hand-crafted menu, for the judging panel to evaluate. Here's a great shot of us posing with our meal. Ironically, after spending 2 hours preparing food, we ate pizza while the judges sampled the meals.

One of the other teams actually made their own ice-cream from scratch. They also won.