This weekend Bryan and I had two things on our mind:
- Reorient ourselves back to a normal schedule
- Kick some butt in the Dodd’s cooking competition/party
After a relaxing Friday night at Tutta Bella with Polly we were able to have a restful Saturday morning. We broke down a lot of boxes and found places for a lot of the items occupying our dining table. Mainly we were procrastinating our run. Finally we got out the door around 2 pm to do a 6.5 mile run around Seward Park. Fortunately we both felt decent enough on the run and my pace was back to the race pace from my half marathon.
After the run we ran a bunch of errands to Bed Bath and Beyond for grilling tools and to buy my new pan set, then to our landlord to pick up the rest of our boxes, and finally QFC to buy 5 chickens and a slew of other ingredients! Bryan had been selected for the BBQ competition on Sunday to cook chicken on the gas grill. We had Mark and Jeff over to try chicken two ways in order to practice for the competition. Bryan tried a Greek spiced spatchcock chicken and a BBQ spiced beer can chicken. We decided on the BBQ spiced beer can chicken to compete. I also made a slew of Greek side dishes.
Sunday morning Bryan prepped his three remaining birds for the event by injecting them and spicing them up and then we set out on scooter to Eureka burger in U Village for a mystery shop lunch. We had a tasty lunch while watching some pre-season football.
At 5 pm we packed up our cooking goods and headed over to the Dodds. The celebration was for Andrew’s birthday and there was the BBQ competition and a mystery box cooking competition. I competed in the 60 minute cooking challenge featuring shrimp, corn on the cob, black garlic and Rice Crispy cereal. I was given those ingredients ahead of time and had come up with an idea pretty quickly but planned it out more right before heading over. The 60 minutes was a hot and sweaty hour of cooking my dish of Thai fried corn cakes with a sweet and sour chili sauce and butter cereal shrimp. They broke out another surprise ingredient of an exotic fruit of rambuton that I fortunately was able to incorporate into my sweet chili sauce. Once the contest was over we had four judges try each dish. I was competing against three other FareStart friends; Anita, Karen, and Shareen. Shockingly my dish won!
The night was so fun with our usual FareStart friends in attendance as well as Polly and Ryu, David and Tina and Marika and Randy. They did not end up judging the meats because they said it was too close but several people told me that Bryan’s chicken, even up against smoked brisket and pork rib loin, was the best chicken they have ever had and was the winner of the night in their book. I was pretty proud of Bryan’s chicken and Bryan was pretty pleased with the outcome himself.
It was a great first weekend back in Seattle and definitely recharged my battery back to usual life.
Chelsea
Evolving in the Emerald City 