First weekend of the second half of the year and it is a gooooood one! As much White Collar that I can fit in around my days and nights (yes, I am in love with Matt Bomer). And wine, giggles, junk food and the annual Rusty Chef Cook off. Amazing day. And thanks to Veeda, we pretty much had a free comic show in the evening.

I want to reiterate that I would never voluntarily move further west because the traffic on the weekend is just horrendous. Given, I was going from South to North but bumper to bumper traffic. So not cool. So not worth it.

Anyways, it was late lunchtime by the time I got there with my cake and bag of ice and we got stuck right into it. 3 teams, 3 colours. A taste test to name the most ingredients let my team take the lead early on and pick the protein: pork cutlets! The second team got a whole chicken and the third team got veal roast. Hahaha.

The rule was we had to use the protein, the limited spices available, a few staple ingredients and the ingredients designated to our Orange box (carrots, pumpkin, sweet potato, dried apricots and oranges).

Came up with sweet potato puree with a orange zest and apricot crumbed cutlet and pumpkin and kale ratatouille. It was soooo good!!!!! Although I will admit that we probably needed more texture - like sweet potato crisps (or pork crackling... which didn't work in an hour) to make the dish come together more. And it was the winning dish... beating the next team by an average of 0.3 points. Yay!

I think we all did a variation of very similar dishes to suit the protein - team yellow did shallot fried chicken with tomato relish and green salad and team red did roast veal with mashed potato and strawberry and mint salad. I think we all ran out of salt towards the end so some of the dishes were a bit bland. Tons of fun though, cause we were all drinking and playing boardgames and taking turns to do everything. And then we facetimed Janny for her birthday and ate her cake that I made. Delish.

Tiring day though, to cook and drink and laugh. Tough life. Haha. Veeda is the funniest when she is drunk (and we all knew that years ago). We played her charades game - everyone had to put three names into a hat and then we took turns guessing. We are so original. There were 3 'Terminators/ Arnold S', 2 Chris Pratt and a whole heap of Avengers characters. Too funny.

Christmas in July next... helllllooooo Turducken!!!!!