We did not win the inaugural Gladiators of Gumbo this weekend in Shreveport, but neither were we chum for the lions. Competing in a field of 31 professional chefs, caterers and home cooks, Roux the Day represented for us amateurs, winning the winner-take-all non-seafood division, while The Spicy Crabs took the seafood division. Gumboo-yah won [...]
Aleve, you complete me. I crawled from bed this morning into a cavalcade of cracks, pops and cramps. Besides the grease burns, nicked fingertips (no blood drawn… yet) and isolated scaldings, competitive cooking has put the hurt on this 41-year-old body… and I have one more week of it. Since January 1, I have run, [...]
Normally it takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes to make my bacon-grease roux. On Sunday, February 24, during test-cook No. 1 for the Gladiators of Gumbo cookoff, it took 18 minutes. 18 minutes! I managed to brown my roux and assemble a palatable version of Pat and Stacy’s Thanksgiving Day Gumbo in 3 [...]
My television viewing habits have bled into my hobbies: I started watching Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo way back in 2005 and subsequently threw up all over myself at the World Series of Poker and finished seventh in the Arizona Women’s State Poker Championship. I turned my attention to Miami Ink on Discovery Channel in 2007 [...]
We found wild fennel at the beach this weekend and decided to plan Iron (Internet) Chef. According to the California Invasive Plant Council, fennel flourishes in coastal areas because it originated in the Mediterranean. It grows so rapidly that CIPC considers it a nuisance. Well, one man’s nuisance is another girl’s nosh: After my third ocean-swimming [...]