Matt's Stupid Gourmet Chef Thing

Okay, so maybe we didn't know all of the rules or expectations but I thought we did a pretty good job. We were told that the requirements were that the day before the cook-off at 5:00 we would be told what the key ingredient from Matt's garden would be and then we had 24 hours to come up with recipes using that ingredient. We would be judged on taste, appearance and the use of other local ingredients & involvement of entire team.

The secret ingredient was revealed- peppers. Joey and I came up with a great idea, fondue. We would do a cheese and a chocolate fondue. Sticking to the stupid rules we went to Pirate O's, a local store that is expensive as hell, and bought all of our ingredients totaling over $100. In the end that didn't matter to the stupid judges, we should of gone to Costco.

The entire family, Team Sepy, helped make the fondue. Addison chopped peppers and then started making the chocolate fondue. She got chocolate on her fingers and then licked it off and realized that her fingers had been chopping the peppers and her mouth was on fire. We gave her bread and tried to calm her mouth down. I then got something in my eye and rubbed it only to realize that I had been chopping peppers as well. Holy @#&*$#! My eyes were on fire. Maia then read online that you should pour milk into your eye to help the pain. Joey got the milk out and I realized that I wasn't going to just pour it over my face. I got a medicine syringe out and put milk in it and pushed it into my eye. After about four shots of it I started to feel better. I hate peppers.

We proceed to go to Luke's house, with strict rules that we had to be ready for judging at 6:30. Where was Matt? Not there at 6:30. We also then realized that this was big time! Many of the people who had done this before had presentation plates with each of their different items to display- like a 5 star restaurant. CRAP! How do you display fondue? Ours tasted really good but how do you display it on a presentation plate where the judges would taste it 30 minutes later. We tried but by the time the cheese and chocolate sauces sat on bread & cookies for 30 minutes their presentation as well as their taste, I'm sure, was not as great as it tasted coming out of the fondue pots hot. Not to mention while we are waiting for judging for 30-40 minutes the fondues were burning and then getting cold waiting for people to actually be able to eat then.

We were robbed!! Ours was really good but we didn't know we were competing against- people who literally spent the entire day preparing gourmet dishes and had presentation plates with fresh flowers on them to help sell the item. If they had actually tasted our delicious cheese & chocolate fondue from the pot with our beautiful arrangement of breads, cookies, fruit, pretzels, marshmallows we would have won.

The cheese sauce was all gone by the time we left. We did have some chocolate fondue left that we put in the fridge to try later. Let me remind you that over time things maybe get more flavorful, especially peppers. Hard to believe that is was to spicy for me to eat the next day- I thought that was impossible.