Saturday, February 09, 2008

How do we Iron Chef? Like this...

We were low numbers this week, so Adam and I decided we should have a sort of head to head Iron Chef style challenge if there was only two of us. He turned up with a bunch of ingredients at my place, I gave him a mystery bag of ingredients to cook.

Strangely enough, we both chose beef for the other, perhaps because we were low confidence seeing as this was the first head to head IC challenge, and frankly it's easy to do something, anything, with beef. What could be more versatile?

Adam was given: Beef, celery, mushrooms, truffle pate.

I, Teddy, was given: Oysters, beef sirloin, duck confit, cherries.

In addition to these ingredients, we had my fridge and cupboards at disposal - carrots, onion, celery, herbs, spices, beans etc etc. The idea was that we would both make two courses in one hour. We decided to take turns so as not to get in each other's way in my space-restricted kitchen. Adam would go first, from 8-9pm, and I from 9-10pm. I also had the makings of a dish I wanted to try - Cod with cockles and oxtail, a sort of Anglo-Welsh combination made famous by Bryn Williams. I would prepare this at a more leisurely pace after the Iron Chef hour.

Clearly, this was perhaps not the most classic way to host and deliver anything remotely like the TV original, some of our instructions to each other regarding ingredients and limitations were confused and misunderstood, but for the first attempt, I thought we did OK, and most importantly, it was a lot of fun.

Here's what happened:











The finished dishes looked like this:

In order of completion, from L-R and top to bottom:

Adam - Wild mushroom salad with brandy-soaked sultanas and truffle
Adam - Seared sirloin with potato hash
Teddy - 'American Dream' tart
Teddy - Oysters 'Theodore' (baked with cheese, garlic, bread, herbs)
Teddy - Duck confit 'salad' with crispy potatoes, cabbage, cherries and Madeira sauce

Teddy - (not part of IC challenge) Bryn Williams' Cod with Cockles and Oxtail


















1 comment:

Mykonos said...

That looks like a lot of fun. I'm surprised one of you time-constrained, drunk fools didn't slice off a finger though.

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