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Iron Chef Hilo: the outcome

Wowee, what a great afternoon and the results are in!   Here's an overview:

Joyce divided her chicken between two dishes.  The first was a delicious chicken soup containing ginger, kefir lime leaves, tomatoes and bananas .  The other was coconut chicken, prepared by dipping the pieces in eggwhites, breading with panko and coconut flakes and oven-frying them.  A hint of lime juice added a bit of zing. 

 

COCONUT CRUSTED FRIED CHICKEN

I also decided to split the chicken between two dishes.  the first was Arroz con Pollo (paprika spiced chicken and rice) with spicy chorizo, celery and tomatoes. 

SPICY ARROZ CON POLLO

A cinnamon spiced chicken pie mixed with bulgar wheat and yogurt baked between buttered phyllo dough pastry sheets was the second dish.

CINNAMON CHICKEN PHYLLO PIE

 

Joyce used her tomatoes in the soup:

COCONUT LIME SOUP WITH BANANAS

Besides the Arroz con Pollo, I also used my tomatoes in a Greek Feta Salad.

GREEK FETA SALAD

We both decided to juice the lemons.  Joyce combined hers with egg yolks and sugar and created a lemon curd topping for her graham cracker cheesecake. 

LEMON CURD CHEESECAKE WITH CHOCOLATE DIPPED STRAWBERRIES

I blended my juice with olive oil, basil, crushed garlic cloves and ground pepper for a simple salad dressing to accompany the Greek Feta Salad.

The bananas were a bit of a challenge.  Joyce took a chance and sliced them, adding them to the afformentioned soup.  The result was a surprising blend of flavors...reminiscent of Thai and African cuisine and the highest scoring dish of the evening.  I cut my bananas lengthwise, fried them in butter and topped them with a mixture of melted butter, chopped almonds, cardomom, sugar and tequila.  The sauce which I thought would be a simple topping ended up caremelizing over the bananas and turning into a crunchy tequila almond-brittle...another one of the evening's favorites:

BANANAS WITH TEQUILA NUT BRITTLE

Each dish was rated on taste/quality, presentation/creativity by our hungry judges on a scale of 1 to 5.  After points are added up, the result is:

JOYCE: 31 pts

SEAN: 30 pts

Close match!  Congratulations to Joyce and thanks to our judges.  It was fun!

more pics soon!

 

IRON CHEF HILO

Q: What do you get when you combine 1 kitchen, 2 cooks, 3 hours, a 4 point grading system, 5 pounds of chicken, 6 lemons, 7 tomatoes, 8 bananas and 9 judges? 

A: Iron Chef Hilo!

Joyce, Joyce, Joyce is possibly the most enthusiastic cook in existence today and has volunteered to host the cook off. Thanks.

RULES: Each participant has 3 hours to prepare a three course (minimum) meal.    Each of the common ingredients must be used in their entirety by each chef to prepare the dishes.  All work must be done by the participants themselves... no helpers or assistants allowed and everything must be prepared from scratch.  Participants will be graded on taste, creativity, food quality and presentation.  Stay tuned for pics!

JUST ANOTHER SUNNY MORNING ON A VOLCANIC ISLAND

The following photo was taken midmorning on Sunday.  Although it looks like a typical rainy day in Hilo, what you see is volcanic haze....the sun is actually shining in a cloudless sky!   Fortunately, we were inside the Kingdom Hall for the majority of the morning and when the meeting was over, the vog had vanished leaving a beautiful, sunny afternoon.

seancentral 1.0

Hi!  I've begun to transfer the photo albums from my old site here to my typepad account.  That means you'll soon be able to see Etienne from Germany preparing foofoo in my kitchen,  Ai from Japan cleaning the Kingdom Hall lot back when it was just a great big field of grass, John and Ralph putting up our vinyl fence, and Shareenie, Adela and I raiding Rosemary's fridge at 1 in the morning.

As a note, the old site no longer works so don't go there unless you want to see a pretty little error message.