A cross-continent cooking competition

One of the things we miss the most about home is hanging out with our friends. No big surprise there! In Tennessee, almost every Friday night was spent hanging out with Chris and Michelle, either going to dinner or cooking together. We decided that it was time to try and recreate some of that fun with the magic of Skype! We planned a cookoff based on the Food Network show Chopped, but where we had to use the honor system & vivid descriptions to choose the winner.

A few days before our designated cookoff, we all picked an ingredient that had to be in our dishes. We all took pictures of our ingredient written on paper and simultaneously texted it to the group so we couldn't be influenced by other people's picks.

We ended up with a couple days to think about our dishes. Toby and I made a trip for supplies but didn't share what we had in mind for our creation. I think that we were both worried that we had the same idea, but it soon became apparent that we were on very different pages!

Then it was cookoff time! Here in Sydney, we made dinner dishes, while Sweden had to make breakky food. I felt like we had an easier mission, but their food did sound pretty delicious!

Our apartment kitchen is small and not stocked with an over abundance of cooking equipment. So we took turns prepping all our food, and then finished everything off simultaneously.

We also had to set up the Skype/food presentation area. Not quite how it looks on Chopped, but it worked!

Our Skyping session consisted of lots of food close ups and self-evaluations of the successes of our concoctions.

For the curious, the ingredients we all had to incorporate into our food were pear, blue cheese, artichoke hearts, and sausage. Toby pulled together an impressive sausage dumplings with pear and blue cheese dipping sauces. Mine was sausage sliders with blue cheese sauce and pear & nectarine chutney. Michelle crafted eggs benedict with zucchini. But Chris won the day with his sausage hash and toast with artichoke hearts!

Even though we were looking at a screen, it was a pretty good substitute for our fun Friday nights! I anticipate more weird, honor-based competitions are in our future.

And just for fun during our respective Saturdays, we also took pictures of what we wore outside on the weekend. Depressingly enough for the Sweden team (who are in the middle of "summer," the type of clothing was pretty much the same!

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