2nd Place in the Thai Cooking Competition!

Yes, my team mate and I got second place in the competition along with 13 other teams. LOL The first place winners got an all expense paid trip to Thailand courtesy of the Royal Thai Government and week to cook with the Chef that visited our school to instruct us on the principals and food profiles/ingredients of authentic Thai foods.

It was a great experience! We had 15 clock hours of extra instruction, which means we started our normal Academy day at 7am and began Thai instruction after our day was over. The Chef gave lectures then demonstrated the methods and techniques of cooking and then actually cooked dishes for us to taste and after that we went to one of our Skills Kitchens to cook the dishes ourselves.

Last week was a long one that had me wondering why I signed up for it but in the end it was truly worth the extra effort and time. I had to cram in my new Culinary Management classwork and homework into the few hours I had left by the time I got back to the old tent I call home. Somehow in between I had to find time to shower, iron uniforms, shop for food, eat and try to renew my health insurance which is expiring at the...oh wait! It expired on the 31st of July! Opps. I missed that. Now I'm without health insurance. OMG. Guess I'll get on that next week. Some things slip through the cracks.

Our competition was interesting in that all 15 teams of two had to cook the very same thing with all the same ingredients. They came out pretty different dispite that oddity. We made Pad Thai Noodles with Pad Thai sauce. Spicy yet delicious. We had to cook over the wok burners which are 100,000 btu's worth of flame. I call them the Jet Engines. They are really powerful and HOT. They cook in seconds and burn in a hurry if you're too slow. The woks we use are entirely made of carbon steel, including the handles. Try to imagine how hot those handles get when it is all metal under 100,000BTU's of heat. Intense. The oil gets dangerously hot in about 5 seconds. Its fun. We quickly add all the ingredients one by one and then plate from the wok. One poor fellow burned himself today on the wok. I felt bad for him. That had to hurt. Someone else cut themselves with the knife. Two teams disqualified ASAP. That's all it takes.

I got a nice certificate for my efforts, made a new friend in my team mate, shared beers with class mates during our break, get to put this experience on my resume and I feel pretty good about myself. What a great day!