vegan cooking

Hey all you out there in the interbutts! I thought my readers (all 14 of you, including my mom) would enjoy seeing some photos from a cooking competition in which I recently competed at my school (Cal State Northridge). Our chapter of SDFSA put on its second annual Iron Matador competition, and my good buddy Carly and I competed against two other teams as team Vegan With a Vengeance! (With apologies to Isa and Terry.) We had three and a half hours to present three dishes: an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. We were presented with three secret ingredients, which we were instructed to include in our recipes as much as possible: ginger, almonds, and lemons. Here’s a look at the action!

Our first dish, a salad, was the Jicama-Watercress-Avocado Salad with Spicy Citrus Vinaigrette from Veganomicon.

It was a big hit with the crowd because it was so gosh-darned pretty, and the dressing came out perfectly. We incorporated the secret ingredient, fresh ginger, into it pretty well, I think.

Here’s us buttering (er, Earth Balance-ing) up the judges.

The next dish was my grilled tofu fajitas. The kitchen smelled fantastic and we had a whole grip o’ spectators coming over sniffing out what had such a lovely aroma once I got it on the grill. We served it along with refried black beans and a fresh pico de gallo salsa with lemon juice (secret ingredient #2!).

Finally, we served the spicy mexican cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, along with a cinnamon coconut and soy ice cream that refused to set because it was so warm in the kitchen, and a yummy chocolate ganache sauce. Almond meal just happened to already be in the recipe, so woot. This was by far our most popular dish. I still have people raving to me about the melty, gooey center of the cupcakes and the perfect spice to the coconut cream. We were pretty proud of this one.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the judges to decide and biting our fingernails off.

Judgement Day:

In the end, we got second place. We heard it was a pretty close race, with us only being off by one point. Though we had wanted to take home the big prize (or at least the gloating rights), we were so exhausted by the end that we were just amazed it was over. We had a great time! Mad props to my buddy big C for being such an awesome partner, the other teams for being such a pleasure to battle, to SDFSA for hosting and organizing a rad event, and the judges and audience for being so awesome. I had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat.