Something Challenging This Way Comes

"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients." - Julia Child


Well...what if I want to do both?

I recently watched a YouTube video about a dad in England who made his 6-year old son an Angry Birds cake. Not only is it decorated and built like the structures in the games (with the pigs and birds) but...it's playable!! He added his own slingshot and the little boy could fire the birds!!

Oh yes...it's pretty awesome. I highly recommend it if 1) you are a fan of (or addicted to) the game and/or 2) you like cool baked goods.

Anyway, this led me to thinking about that Food Network Challenge show and Iron Chef and how I like challenges myself. So I enlisted the help of my partner-in-crime, Andy, to help me create a list of challenges for me to do. As it stands, here they are (in no particular order):

1) Baking - this could be a taste, decorating, designing, characters, structures, etc
2) Duplicate - this is to duplicate a restaurant dish as closely as possible
3) Secret Ingredient - basically Iron Chef baby!
4) Instruction - instructing someone else to cook a recipe (without helping - physically)
5) Edible - reconstructing someones least favorite foods into something they will eat
6) Throwdown - head to head competition with another person (minus Bobby Flay) :-(
7) Distraction - making a dish while someone tries to distract you (safely)
8) Cocktail - creating an original recipe (use to do this all the time..but I'm a bit rusty)
9) Pumpple - taken out of the Baking category for its own challenge (tune in for that one!)
10) Lobster - cook my own lobster and create a dish with it
11) Outdoor - bring all ingredients to a park to cook with a grill only
12) Inhibited - still working the details out on this one, but safety would be watched here!

There will new challenges added as we think of them, but each challenge will have its own set of rules, supervision and I'm sure judging criteria. We will post photos and maybe even videos to show the successes and failures of these challenges...

So be sure to tune in!!

Gnomeo vs Bieber

It all began with Super Bowl XLV last Sunday. As the Green Bay Packers were running down the clock to claim victory as the Super Bowl Champions against the Pittsburgh Steelers, I was doubly excited.

1) Green Bay was the team I was picking to win.

2) Green Bay winning meant I won a bet

Let me back up.

Once the teams were determined, I decided to ask my dear Andy to see if he would like to make a bet about the Super Bowl. We bet on a lot of other things, including this past season's World Series, so why not the SB?

I knew Andy would be cheering for the Steelers, since he had a connection with Pittsburgh, so I vowed to cheer for the Packers. In honesty, I am more of a fan of GB in comparison to the Steelers, but I would have cheered for either team.

The wager: the loser had to take the winner to a movie date of their choosing.

The stakes: Steelers win = me taking Andy to Justin Bieber's Never Say Never movie. Packers win = Andy taking me to Disney's Gnomeo & Juliet.

I can't tell you how happy I was that my boys Aaron Rogers, Clay Matthews and the rest of the Green Bay Packers pulled through in the end. I really didn't want to see Justin Bieber.



I collected on my bet today...and the movie was actually very funny (particularly for theatre/Shakespeare savvy people) and ..... bom bom BOM....

ANDY LIKED IT!!!

It was a good day!! :-)