Loins of Fire!

Crikey. I took the Red Eye Virtual Kitchen Stadium Cook-off down to the wire last night. After spending all day at work thinking about cooking with tamarind, after 5pm I actually got to do it. I grabbed some pods from the New Whole Foods on Kingsbury, which I totally wanted to explore more, but I was a woman on a mission and in a hurry, so I paid for my pods and biked like a mad woman home. From then on it was non-stop cooking until about 7:20pm. I simmered rice, I made a marinade and sat my pork loin in it, I chopped, I picked cilantro from my herb garden, I diced, and I seared. My phone was buzzing with people wanting to know when they could come over to eat, and I ignored it.

After 8pm I got to breathe for a few minutes before friends arrived to devour the goodness. I spooned up more black bean cakes, and I put the other pork loin in the oven. I've got to admit, it got so down to the wire that I wish my presentation was a bit better, but, it is what it is. The way I cook is very fluid,

I would say, in the fact that I look at a recipe, get the overall idea, and then go from there. So writing down exactly what I did was way more painstaking that I imagined. I think I even left out several ingredients. Oops. I have awesome dishes and baked goods that I've made once or twice and STILL haven't written out the recipe. I'll have a 1/2 sheet of paper with a title on it and some basic brush strokes about what goes in it, but the rest is up to my memory and maybe my tongue, to adjust things accordingly. So basically, time crunch, and I think I may suffer for it. We'll see tomorrow. If I DO advance to the next cook-off round, I am definitely taking a half day at work, that is for certain.

But I had a great time doing it and it was fun getting all my friends involved in the eating and the voting. Too bad I couldn't have paired one of my Contest Winning Cupcakes from the night previous at Iron Cupcakes Chicago. Alas, no tamarind in there.

Check back for contest details! Rick Bayless (Mr. Bayless? Would I call him Rick if I met him face-to-face?) will announce his winners at 11am tomorrow on twitter.