Our Family: Iron Chef Dinner Party

Get ready for one of the best ideas in recent history. Some friends of our decided to put a twist on the stand-bye get together, "The Dinner Party". They turned it into a cut-throat competition. We, along with most of the seven couples invited, have a fondness for food...that is, eating it, cooking it, talking about it, etc. So, they declared this to be the Iron Chef Dinner Party. All seven couples submitted a "secret ingredient" to the hostess by email. Twenty-four hours before the party, the hostess chose the winning ingredient (without telling her husband who was doing the cooking) and emailed everyone the winning choice. We, the participants, had 24 hours to scheme, decide on our dishes, grocery shop, trash talk, and cook/BBQ/bake/mix TWO dishes to bring with us to the party. The secret ingredient chosen was COFFEE! Altogether we had 14 dishes to sample and vote on. I'm telling you this food was amazing and it was like ordering 14 different things from a fancy menu. Chris and I submitted rotisserie lamb shanks with a coffee rub and coffee stout glaze. He also did a homemade Irish Coffee Ice Cream to accompany my 3 layer Dark Chocolate Coffee Mousse Cake. Yeah!! Along with our dishes, we brought a $5 gift card to a food related place to put in the pot. The winner got to take home all the gift cards.
As we showed up at 7:00 sharp, we all set out our dishes by a number. Then, we were given scoring sheets with numbers 1-14 and columns to tally points. Each dish was given 1-10 points for each of 3 categories: taste, use of ingredient, and creativity...30 points possible. We took a few minutes to describe our dishes and how we used the secret ingredient, coffee. As we ate it just got better and better. We had everything from pulled pork, coffee bean pancakes with chocolate sauce, smoked chicken marinated in coffee, coffee fudge in a demitasse cup (my favorite) , pork loin on grits cakes, coffee braised short ribs, coffee tiramisu, and of course our shanks and cake and ice cream. Guess who's dish was rated the best of the whole night!!!???? Our cake and ice cream! But, because you were judged on the combo of your two dishes, we did not win overall. I have to say we had some tough competition. Most of all, we had so much fun for a full 24 hours with planning, cooking, tasting, and ragging. Here's a few shots of the dishes.

Sarah putting finishing touches on the cake