Allez cuisine!

The Debutante House held their philanthropy event last night - a cooking competition based on Iron Chef, but modified to allow for more competition categories. Each house (frat or sorority) can submit a dish to each category. The frats get really competitive and it can definitely be hard to top them in categories like barbecue. They tend to dominate in anything that involves meat and marinating. Sororities tend to dominate in baking.

But the really big highlight and main event is the actual timed competition itself. It's set up pretty much like the show, but with 2 hours for cooking time. Each house basically gets a list of like 5 potential ingredients that could be the "secret" ingredient so they can put together some kind of strategy to come up with a number of dishes.

The House's team consisted of The Stepford Daughter, The Sorority Prodigy, The Always Excited Sister, and The Really Innocent Sister. The Stepford Daughter always has to get everything perfect and is totally anal retentive, but at least she gets things done and done well. The Always Excited Sister is ... as her title implies, always excited. About everything. It's a little unnerving really because nobody should ever be that excited about everything. The Really Innocent Sister is so naive and innocent about everything... it's a little ironic since she's her pledge class's and also The House's Littlest Little, which just means that by lineage she's the "baby". Her Big-Lil family line is the longest with current sisters in The House. She's like a Great Great Great Grand Lil since her family added another new Little to their line like every single time we've even had pledges.

Anyway, they all sat down with The House's chef and planned out menus for each item on the list. We love The Chef... he made samples of each dish so we could figure out what we liked best and then the team practiced with him. And The Pastry Chef showed them different desserts they could do too. The Sorority Prodigy told me the list of possible secret ingredients: tortillas, cream cheese, rice krispies (the cereal), apples, and beer. The theme was "typical things you'd find in a college student's refrigerator." I was surprised all the advisors (University, Panhell, and The Debutantes' own international) all approved beer as a possible secret ingredient. Whatever though they weren't going to pick beer even though that would have been so awesome. Instead, the secret ingredient turned out to be cream cheese and our dishes ended up being:

Artichoke Cream Cheese Spread on Crostinis
Chicken Manicotti
Thyme Cheese Potatoes
Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting
Cheesecake Pops

SO good. And we won. Apparently people were thrown for a loop because cream cheese is something they only see on bagels or something. Well at least for the frats. Most of the sororities only came up with things that were sweets where we had a variety. We tend to care more than others about competition so we tend to win. Although there are some events which we just don't care all that much about because they're kind of lame.