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Ironjack competes at Ironchef: AustinSo it started out small.... Kavita and I were riding to Napa via my sister Christine. Christine mentioned that her friends had gotten together to do an ironchef competition. I said, "wow, sounds like fun. I wanna do that". Then Kavita said, " Yeah, and I just got this Digital video camera that I want to try out, we could film it". It kinda went from there.Next came the challenger. We had to find someone that knew what they were doing in the kitchen. We thought about this, and thought about Paula (my boss's wife), she wants to be a caterer, perfect. On top of that Ross (my boss) really likes to do film work. Even better. We all meet up, add another layer to the snowball, we decide to get a chairman Kaga, another announcer, find a neutral kitchen (we ditched that idea), and neutral judges. And we bust out the post production. Oh and we invite an audience. The pressure is now on! Anyways here was the format: Kavita got a food critic friend of hers to pick 3 ingrediants. Each of us gets 1 veto, and the ingrediants are shown in sequential order (so you don't know what you might get if you veto). We then have 30 mins to come up with a menu, write it down and thus commit ourselves (as in, if we had a fully stocked kitchen we could start cooking right then and there.) We agreed on a certain amount of prepwork on certain things, and then went shopping. So for the record the first ingrediant was Avocado (Paula vetoed), Second ingrediant was what we went with (revealed below), and the thrid ingrediant was going to be Choyte (cactus, good thing I didn't veto). Fast forward to the next day. I got there bright and early to setup. People shuffled in around noon, and we started filming different sequences, like entrances and such. At around 12:20 we started the cooking. Let me tell you, that was some intense cooking action. That kitchen got at least 10 degrees hotter, and we were running around like mad getting stuff done. It was a ton of fun. Amazingly, Paula and I didn't really get in each other's way. Afterwards, we presented our dishes and explained them to the judges. The judges voted on a 20 point scale, 10 for taste, 5 for presentation, and 5 for originality. A nerve-wracking ordeal to be sure. But both of us were on top of the game that day. It's a bit hard to see in the pictures the foods (I had to re create some of the dishes for close up pictures, which are featured in the cooking section).A big thanks to Tony Burke for taking all the photos
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