Iron Chef Erik Green Olives

Thank you to everyone who voted for Iron Chef Erik's secret ingredient. The winner was green olives!!
Erik made 4 dishes:

• Chicken salad with Italian Olive Dressing. Erik cooked chicken in olive oil and put it on a bed of lettuce with chopped tomatoes on top. He made an Italian dressing with chopped green olives. This dish had a very strong olive flavor.
• Fried BLT wtih Olive mayo. Erik received a lot of originality points for this one. He put bacon, olives, lettuce, and tomato in a burrito shell and then fried them in olive oil. Then he made mayonnaise with green and black olives. YUM!
• Creamy olive rice. This dish was composed of rice, bleu cheese, cream cheese, green olives, and chopped peppers. The green olive flavor came out well in this dish and he paired it well with the cheeses.
• Olive spread with crackers. Erik used one of the olive containers to put the olive spread. This was a cream cheese spread with chopped olives, sour cream, juice from the green olives, and chopped orange peppers. We spread this on crackers. Yum!

I gave Erik 15.125 and he rated himself a 15. This was a really fun Iron chef. We will take a break for a few weeks, but I'm saving that poll for his next Iron Chef!

I've had an incredible week. Here's what happened:

1. Wednesday - I beat Erik at Squash!!! We've been playing for a few months and I've never won. But I beat him 9-7 (you have to win by 2). I jumped so high!!

2. Wednesday - I finally reached level 80 with my Paladin. I started the night at 83%. I've never been the highest level in the game before the next release comes out. Yea!

3. Sunday (today) - I received notice that my paper was accepted to BIOCOMP 09. I'm going to Vegas baby! The conference is July 13-16. Yea! And I read on the site that they only accepted 27% of papers.

You'd think that I was on a roll and would get an awesome score in Quiddler - no, just 80 although the minimum score was 75 so that wasn't too bad :).