"Iron Chef" - The Great Race - Week 2

This past Friday night was the second round of the "Great Race" "Iron chef" competition of 2008.
There are two more, but we will unfortunately be missing next Fridays due to work schedule conflicts . We're looking forward to the finale in two weeks - we are hoping there will be a pie fight. There HAS to be a pie fight - "The Great Race" is FAMOUS for its fantastic pie fight!

In the Movie, the first stop was a western town - thus our western theme for last week, and this week was paying homage to the scene in the movie where they are on an ice berg floating in the ocean and had to eat what food was in their cars.

The competition Friday night was to come up with a main dish, a side dish, and a desert - all using foods that might be found in a car - at least for starters. A quick car race using toy cars decided what each team (4 teams) would start with - the non-vegan (vegetarian) teams had their choice of either a bag of chicken McNuggets (4-5 boxes of 10 pieces) , a bag of Arby Roast Beef Sandwhiches (about 8) or a bag of Hormel chili - 4-5 cans.

Our team consisted of the wife, Dave (Mr. Hot Sauce), myself, and our friend Ed from our monthly gaming sessions.

Unfortunately, we did poorly in the initial race, and had the last pick - and of course all that was left was the chili.

There were some more races to decide on the picking order of the ingredients for the side dish, and then for the dessert.

Our side dish ingredients contained some Slim Jims and beef jerky.
Our dessert bag contained a box of Hostess Ding Dongs and some other sickly sweet items.

For our main dish - since we had cans of chili - we decided it would be simplest just to make chili - but with additions - like chopped up hotdogs and ground up Slim Jims and beef jerky for flavoring. I wasn't that enthused with the main dish - I was concentrating on the dessert - more on that in a second.

For the side dish, Dave found the fixings for french bread, so we made a loaf of french bread - and then some garlic butter - and I made sure we went easy on the garlic - since it is so easy to get carried away. (especially when you have "too much is never enough" Dave on your team!)
They then topped off the bread with cheese - and it actually was not bad.

The dessert was the highlight of the meal for me. The rules stated that the end product could not be simply what you started with - which we kinda bent with the chili - but what are you going to make out of cans of chili?! Hmm, in hindsight - maybe we could have made some sort of chili burgers or Sloppy Joes. Oh well - maybe next time.

So we could not simply serve Hostess Ding Dongs - we had to do something with them.
I came up with the idea of using a blender to make them into a pie filling - since we had found some pie dough.
Blending a whole box of Ding Dongs went pretty well - but we needed some binder, so we found a tub of whipped cream and used the whole thing. At that point, the mixture was too fluid, so we needed something to thicken it up. Digging through the cupboards we found some chocolate and vanilla instant pudding mix - so we added three boxes of pudding and a cup of milk.

At this point we were laughing and joking about the sugar content of our dish - and asking if there were any diabetics in the house - at which point our host replied - "Not yet!"

Unfortunately, our Pie crust did not turn out very well - it sorta fell into itself while in the oven and we just ended up with a baked circle of dough at the bottom of a dish.

The pie idea went into the garbage along with the crust, so we went to plan B - using the filling as a sort of a pudding - along with some Nilla wafers for use as scoops.
In retrospect, it was probably a GOOD thing that the crust plan went by the wayside, for the crust to come into play - one would have had to cut a THICK slice of our desert - and consumption of that much tasty goodness, may have been seriously detrimental to anyone wishing to get some sleep that night or the next night or.... ;-)

We arranged the pudding in a bowl with Nilla wafers around the edge - and then Dave found some strawberries and placed one in the middle for color. Whipped cream would have looked good on it also - but alas, we had already used all there was.

After everyone was done with their dishes - we all brought them to the dining room table for presentation, where everyone sampled each others dish - and then later voted on which team you felt had the best main dish / side dish combination - and which team had the best dessert.

I did not have very high hopes for our chili - and our main dish /side dish tied for third place.
Hmmm - same as last week - at least we are consistent!

What was a BIG shocker to us though - is our dessert came in first place!
There was a lot left over - because it was super rich - but people really liked it. I think I had only a spoonful of it - and it had probably as much calories as the rest of the meal I ate.

Our chili - as expected was not that good - I just do not like bought chili other than the chili served at a local restaurant "The Barn" - and this was no Barn chili.

As usual we had a great time - and talked to our friends - and then left for home about 11 - getting there about midnight.