Top Iron BLF

This was probably one of the funnest things I've got to do through BLF! While I'm no master chef, nor a chef at all, one of my favorite activities involves eating. Since my family is in North Carolina, I brought one of the closest people I have to family, my friend Kali Grant who is also a student at OSU. I'm so happy she was able to come and have a  great time!

The most 'cooking' Kali and I have ever done together was make guacamole so working in the kitchen with not just her but also Ben, his dad, Jenny, and Paul was such an exciting and exhilarating experience. I think within the first five minutes of the competition and after acknowledging Kali is a vegetarian, the group dynamics were established as to the varying levels of how comfortable people felt around the kitchen. I think we effectively utilized everyone's strengths, and we were all able to contribute accordingly to our ability. Ben and his dad took up the preparation of the food ie chopping and cutting and dicing. (There might've even been a tear or two shed over the the father-son bonding...or the onions.) Jenny's name is written all over that fabulous pho and Paul definitely steered our direction with the sweet potatoes. My cooking skills are embarrassingly abysmal, so I did what I could, running around getting things that were needed and coming up with the ideas, not so much the execution.

I remembered when we were discussing how to cook the sweet potatoes, I was a little hesitant when they wanted to add caramelized onions and make it spicy. Now, I'm an adventurous eater, but I've only had sweet potato in its steamed form with cinnamon butter or when it's cooked into fries. So I wasn't exactly confident but since I knew literally next to nothing about cooking, I willingly put my faith and trust in my teammates, and I was blown away by the result! After it was over, Kali and I were saying how we were going to make that for dinner later...

One of the judges talked about being unconventional, and that really resonated with me. I think that term also reflects our pho and sweet potatoes. This concept of how some of the best things in life can be a result of not-so-obvious combinations of different flavors and mediums taught me to think and live (and eat) unconventionally.