A couple weeks ago, my company had a "Top Chef" competition. Each team at the company had to nominate 5 competitors who together had to make a winning dish and drink for our panel of judges: the CEO, VP of product, and VP of sales. The rules were that we had to :
- Use 5 items from a "pantry" of ingredients that they had bought (fruits, veggies, breads, alcohols, etc.)
- Use 3 items from our usual array of office snacks
- Use the secret ingredient...Taco Bell Hot Sauce
- Use gadgets around the office kitchen (not much more than a coffee maker, toaster oven, and microwave)
- Plate three dishes and serve 3 drinks
- Be done in 20 minutes!
My team decided to make a dessert crostini of sorts. We cut slices of a baguette, mashed up fresh berries, and spread them on top of the baguette and toasted it. We then mixed some cream cheese, plain greek yogurt, sugar, and coffee powder to make the topping. We topped the crostinis with some more fresh berries and an almond. The real kicker of our dessert was our Taco Bell mole sauce--melted dark chocolate with a bunch of Taco Bell sauce packets. I thought the sauce actually tasted quite good! Our drink, "simplicity," was well...simple. It was basically gin with strawberries. I think we were most impressive in our use of office snacks: cream cheese, greek yogurt, pieces of chocolate, coffee powder, almonds, and sugar.
We were judged on taste, the plating, and a short presentation that we gave to the judges. Alas, we did not win. We lost to a bunch of teams who made sandwiches :( and the marketing team who was very well bred in the art of presentations. Still, we like to tell ourselves that we did a good job, and that our concoctions were not entirely gross!
Robbed!
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