Iron Chef Shallots

To spice things up in our iron chef competitions, Erik used his culinary skills as iron chef this weekend with a secret ingredient of shallots. We absolutely LOVE shallots in cooking. They are a cross between garlic and onions and add delicious flavor to any dish (well almost any dish). Erik was the iron chef, and as this was his first time in a solo competition, he was 20 minutes over. However, his dishes were excellent! He made:

• Fresh shallot salad. This salad was almost a salsa. It was a mixture of tomatoes, tomatillos, shallots, green and red peppers, and italian dressing - absolutely yum!
• Rice with shallots and tomatoes. In this dish, Erik finely grated shallots and a ham steak and mixed it with rice and cream cheese. In the middle of this ring of rice (you can see in the picture), he put the shallot salad from dish 1. It was good but the rice needed something more to give it more flavor. Good though.
• Shallot dip. This dip with crackers was fantastic! He roasted shallots on the grill (it wasn't that cold - too cold for me to think about going outside and roasting on the grill though), then he mixed those roasted shallots with fresh shallots and made a cream cheese and spice mixture. He made two versions, one with an infinite amount of cayenne pepper and the other was milder. Both were delicious!!
• Pasta with shallots. In this dish, Erik put shallots and roasted chicken in a red sauce over pasta with shredded mozarella on top. This was also a great dish too.

A very successful iron chef. He rated himself as a 13.05 and I rated him as a 13.75.

In other news:

1. I just got my hair done and now I really look like a skunk. I wanted to touch up my highlights before my lasik on Friday (don't ask about the connection) and the highlights look blonde. So I have blonde hair now??? Well I took a picture and decided that my teeth were too yellow. So I used my mad photoshop skills to whiten them. Ummm.... I think I need to practice more.
2. I scored a miserable 54 on Quiddler today www.setgame.com because there were hardly any vowels!
3. I'm doing some Excel spreadsheet work for a local non-profit organization to help them out. I've made some nifty macros, etc. to speed up their processing. I hope it helps them.
4. Columbus Right To Life is having a 40 days for life initiative and I would like to help out. It will be over lent so I'm trying to decide what to give up for lent. I'm thinking about giving up red meat and using the 40 days to read through the 4 gospels. 40/4 = 10 which means I'll have 10 days to read each gospel (I'm so good at math!).
5. I'm getting Lasik on Friday!!! Yea!!