Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are

Confucius once said "Girls only want guys with sweet skills". Or maybe it was Napoleon Dynamite who said that, but the wisdom is still there. That's why I think that viewing the college experience exclusively as intellectualism and classes and learning from books is kinda silly. The opportunities I've had to learn and grow my sweet skills, beyond what's covered in class, are immense, but let me share one of my recent favorites: Iron Chef.


Yale College Council is the student government tasked with (among other things) spending large amounts of money to entertain me. One of their new creations for this year was an Iron Chef competition pitting teams from each residential college in the ultimate culinary battle for eternal glory, cash prizes, and having their recipe immortalized on the menus of dining halls campus-wide.

The Jonathan Edwards Team: Felicia, Jingying, and me.
Notice our sweet chef toques with the JE crest on them.

Our largest dining hall, Woolsey Commons (which was where they filmed the library motorcycle chase in Indiana Jones IV) was converted into a "Kitchen Stadium", with cooks lining the edge and enormous screens projecting all the action as it happened. The whole thing was mocked up to be just like the Iron Chef TV show itself, with film crews from YTV interspersed. As everyone else came through for dinner, they had the chance to watch our hardcore cookery in action as they explored the kitchen stadium or watched on the giant screens. The only thing we were lacking from the actual Iron Chef was the guy who does backflips.

And the secret ingredient is...

...butternut squash! (Ooh, dramatic fog machine!)
(And then the announcer in the middle did backflips.) (Except not actually.)

Unlike the show, we knew our secret ingredient of butternut squash in advance so we could plot out and practice a recipe, because none of us of are actually professional chefs. (Err... actually most of us aren't. I was competing against people who had taken gap years to cook professionally in Europe.) Each team worked with the dining staff in their own colleges to invent their own recipe and practice it to perfection.

My team created an appetizer that was candied squash and fried goat cheese medallions on a bed of arugula, garnished with pink onions and a vinaigrette that featured vermont maple syrup, as part of the competition's focus on using local and seasonal flavors. We then bloomed our own spice blend from scratch to make a chicken and squash fall curry, served in a hollowed-out squash bowl with a trench of rice carved into the wide stem of the gourd.

The judges, Dean-turned-Provost Salovey, Dean Miller,
and the Head Chef of Yale Dining, debate their favorites.

Best of all, after the judges had sampled a plate,
everyone else got the chance to taste all the dishes.
Nom nom nom.

Cooking requires enthusiasm! I even got to keep the sweet sign
for my team's area, now hung proudly in my common room.

YTV is in the process of editing all the footage together to make a professional, hour-long episode of the competition. Once that's all put together, I'll definitely share some video footage with you. My team didn't win, but I learned some ballin' new cooking techniques and scored major points when I made that salad for my family on Thanksgiving.