Popcorn O'Rama

Sometime this fall, Columbia Law School held an iron chef competition. Since I have no friends at Columbia (at least none with demonstrated cooking ability), I decided this would not be a viable competition for me, though it did seem like a lot of fun. Then in a late night phone conversation, Hannah and I decided this would be a fun New Years "weekend" activity. So, on January 1, the throw down took place.

The logistics of the process were as follows: There were four of us competing. We decided to make a four course meal with an amuse-bouche for each team (so six courses in all). Each person put a secret ingredient into a hat and we chose. The chosen ingredient (as the title of this post suggests) was popcorn (my pick). I was scorned for this selection at every step of the way, but I maintain that it provided a good amount of challenge and some tasty results. After we had an ingredient we selected teams and courses and the game began.

I'll leave it to everyone to post their individual recipes, and I think Hannah took some pictures of the whole thing that are pretty amusing. In the process of preparing the recipes, two patterns emerged: (1) grind up the popcorn and use it as a substitute for bread crumbs/flour or (2) season the popcorn and add it to things you already like.

While we never engaged in any official scoring, Hannah unilaterally declared that she and Elizabeth won because, while Christine and I won for taste (no bias here - this was her declaration), we lost badly on plating (because she claims we copied her). While I readily concede that we did serve little shot glasses of Corona with our amuse-bouche (copying their shot glass of milk), there were no further instances of copying in the plating department. Since taste is worth 10 points and plating only 5, I submit it must be a wash at best (the other scoring category is originality, an area where I think we pretty much tied). Regardless of score, it was a pretty fun time, even though I think most of us are not too anxious to see any more popcorn for quite some time.

Here's the menu:

• Amuse-Bouche I: Green apple with white chocolate peanut butter and "perfect popcorn" with a shot of milk. (I don't mean those quotes to be sarcastic, I'm just repeating the descriptive used when served. Elizabeth popped lots and lots (and lots) of popcorn, and did a very good job with that task).
• Amuse-Bouche II: Popcorn-Beer battered Zucchini sticks.
• Appetizer: Popcorn Parmesan encrusted vegetable slices with a popcorn, parmesan, tomato dipping sauce.
• Soup: Corn Chowder with roasted red peppers and ceranno chilies served with spicy popcorn and sharp cheddar cheese topping.
• Main Course: Acorn and Butternut Moroccan Squash sprinkled with oven seared chickpeas and cinnamon popcorn.
• Dessert: Chocolate toffee with pecans and salted popcorn, and 8 layer bars (the 8th layer being salted popcorn).

Lessons Learned (if we ever decide to do this again):

1. No full sized courses. Everything should be amuse-bouche sized.
2. Set a time limit and try to stick to it, or be prepared to eat dinner at 10:30 pm after having cooked for 4 hours.
3. Don't disparage the chosen ingredient!!
4. If we're going to score at all, have a plan for blind scoring.