September 10, 2007

Doin' Time at Leavenworth

Well, we headed to Ft. Leavenworth Friday night for the Riverside Resources fundraiser competition. Never in our short cooking career have we had so much go wrong in so little time. So much that I started keeping a list.

We got there at 10 minutes to 7 only to discover the cook's meeting had been moved to 7 instead of 8. It took over 10 minutes just to figure out where to put the Mallard. Then when we tried to level it, we couldn't because of the slope of the hill we were on. But we had electricity! Only, no adaptor for our plug. Then while we're trying to figure that out, the organizer comes over to do our meat inspection. The meat was still in the cooler, next to the front door of our HOUSE. Along with our sauce and chicken marinade. By now, we're starting to attract sympathetic stares and offers of spare meat. Tim's furious and we're both starving. At 7:30 we unhitch the Mallard and I head for home to pick up an adaptor, the meat cooler and chairs.

2 miles east of Leavenworth, on the way back, I attracted the most unwanted attention of a Platte County Sheriff -- 73 in a 55, $125 ticket and a lecture about deer in the dark.

After a fun frisking by the MPs I get back to deliver food, the adaptor, the meat -- but no chairs. My very put out darling had long since lost his sense of humor and we completed our long night by quietly going to work and ignoring each other as much as possible.

Next morning dawns and most everything ended up slightly overdone and falling apart again - great for a backyard but crap for competition. The gloom started settling over both of us at awards. Nothing for chicken, ribs or pork. A pitiful 9th for brisket. But surprise of surprises... with only one sad little call we finished 5th!!!! A 623, our highest cumulative score ever!

Also I saved out 2 pieces of the frozen chocolate pie (above) I turned in for the dessert category. It got high marks but still finished 14/20 -- it's hard to screw up a dessert so everyone's scores are pretty high. We savored our pie and our 5th place and packed it in for another week.

One more competition to go... Atchison is next weekend. We'll judge at Shawnee, but no more cooking. After next week we hang up our aprons until spring so we don't have any competitions overlapping the arrival of the new grandbaby.