Iron Chef Battle: Erik vs. Gina

Battle: Erik vs. Gina with sous chefs Missy and Amanda!

This Iron Chef battle was intense considering I have never battled Erik before. It was nonstop action! Missy and Amanda chose the secret ingredient: Cashews! Yum! What a delicious secret ingredient. Who doesn't love cashews? Missy was Erik's sous chef and Amanda was my sous chef. It was so wonderful to have a sous chef to bounce ideas off of and force to chop nuts for you :). In the grueling hour, we made the following dishes.

Erik:

• Cheesey cashew chicken with cashew olives. This dish was an appetizer course. The chicken was breaded in a cashew mixture and fried. The olives were very interesting. Erik made a sweet cashew spread that he put inside the green olives. That was a creative idea.
• Cashew tacos. This was by far the most creative use of the secret ingredient. Erik mixed cashews, refried beans, and taco seasoning to create a protein filling for tacos. Then Erik and Missy created a little taco bar to make your own tacos. The cashew refried bean mixture was actually good.
• Caramel cashew tart. This was a layered phyllo dough pastry with cashews in between each layer drizzled with caramel and baked. As a finish he put ice cream and whip cream on top. While this was good, it was a little burnt.

Gina:

• Cashew fruit salad with honey lemon dressing. This was a light refreshing salad with a sweet dressing. This salad had pineapple, mandarin oranges, strawberries, blueberries, coconut, and cashews of course.
• Trio of nut scallop pasta. This dish had crushed cashews, almonds, and pecans in a light butter sauce. I also added tomatoes and basil for color however they ended up taking the spotlight where the trio of nuts should have shined. This dish was yummy, however I could have made it better without the tomato and basil.
• Cashew Caramel Creme parfaits. When Erik tasted this dish he gave me a look. The look said "you're going to win". This dish was so awesome. I mixed cream cheese, butter, cinnamon and powdered sugar and layered it with cashews, caramel, and crushed snickerdoodles. It was absolutely heavenly.
• Cashew buckeyes. For this dish I combined peanut butter, cashews, butter and powdered sugar (the usual buckeye ingredients) and dipped it in semi-sweet chocolate. Then I sprinkled some cashews on top. Amanda made little graham cracker cashew smores to balance out the plate. This was heavenly to me but after 7 heavy cashew dishes, this one was almost too much.

The score was very close. Out of a total of 40 points (since both Amanda and Missy were scoring us) I earned 32.25and Erik earned 31. I couldn't believe I was victorious! Erik was a tough competitor. This was so much fun and even Missy and Amanda enjoyed themselves.

While Missy and Amanda were here, Missy tapped with Jenna and Sarah (see picture). Missy takes tap dancing so they were able to all tap together. It was so cute.
In other exciting news, we bought a new 7' long dining room table and now we actually have a dining room instead of two playrooms. This table is so massive it takes up the whole dining room. It should be great when we have family over and for our Tuesday night Bible studies. Tomorrow I'm making sun dried tomato chicken pasta. Yum!

Today I did terrible at Quiddler 68 points and lost the z and j. Who likes those letters anyway?