I am not much in the kitchen. One of my greater feats was telling a friend to grind up Reese's Cups and put them on top of a chocolate cake with peanut butter icing. While the actual work was going on, I was throwing the excess Reese's Cups at her boyfriend to see if he could catch them in his mouth.
With all of this said, I watch just enough food network to be dangerous. I made a vain attempt to cook Cornish hens one time because of the Neelys' show. However, the competition shows are the only network productions that I can really watch. And the granddaddy of all food network competitions is Iron Chef-more specifically for us, Iron Chef America.
However, i was a little concerned when asked to judge an Iron Chef competition as part of a Disciple Now. While I enjoy both the show and food, I also realize that cooking is not the easiest thing in the world and to expect 7-12 graders to create culinary masterpieces is a bit much. Furthermore, when you judge a contest, you have to at least taste all of the items, otherwise your judgment is a bit skewed. And even if the students were providing their very best efforts, I was a little nervous about the secret ingredient. Secret ingredients are a little scary when you have accomplished chefs. When you have an eighth grader who can jack up a Hot Pocket, a secret ingredient may put you in the hospital.
The youth pastor had prepared the students ahead of time and they had showed up with everything save the secret ingredient. Some of them brought raw chicken. Others brought eggs. I was a little nervous, half-expecting some kid to roll around in contaminated peanut butter. They were shaking and baking up ideas when the youth pastor announced the ingredient. I was about to be part of Battle Ham!
Ham is not easy to work into anything that is not a sandwich. I have to make an overt effort to eat ham; I never say, "I think that I will eat ham today." This ham was not even sandwich ham; it was 'fresh off the hock' kind of ham. And this ham was presented to me in every way that you can imagine.
I ate a ham pot pie. I ate a hamburger, complete with ground ham. I ate some twisted macaroni and cheese with ham. Lots of breakfast type ham presentations crossed my path; some of the ham wrapped around chicken and fried. This really posed an enormous threat to all things safe and edible, in my humble opinion. There were 'hambrellas' placed on cookie nuggets. One group even ground up ham in a red velvet cake batter.
The funniest part to me was that one group decided to do a medley of Mexican. They did ham and steak fajitas, complete with ham salsa and a sopapilla with ice cream chocolate sauce and a ham garnish. I realized that their food would have been the same with or without the ham. They made fajitas and said, "Throw some ham in that!"
They conjured up salsa and someone slapped some pig in and said, "Boom! Ham!" And ham on ice cream-that had to be an accident.
When it was all said and done, the contest was an 'other white meat' filled success. But I did leave with a few prevailing questions about myself. Are my faith and the actions that my faith generates something that deeply rooted in me, or just something that accentuates me? It seems like it easy for all of us to 'do what we're supposed to do.' Yet when we look at the life of Jesus (not to mention the Old Testament prophets), we see that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is a reprehensible act.
If nothing else, this weekend gave me something to chew on...
