If you can’t take the heat, get back in the kitchen.
Culinary competition. Ask any chef how they feel about it and you will get one response or the other. Terrifying or exhilarating. I happen to be of the latter school.
I love it. Give me a dozen or so stressed out chefs, a handful of poker faced judges, a pack of paparazzi and a huge hungry audience and we have the recipe for my favorite “blood sport”: culinary competition.
Last July when I won the coveted crown of Maine Lobster Chef of the Year, one of the prizes was to be appointed as the chef to represent Maine in the Great American Seafood Competition in New Orleans. The two day event, sponsored by NOAA and the Food Network, is huge. It is a media event for the seafood industry and very critical for the recovering economy of New Orleans. The Louisiana Seafood Council pulls out all the stops to make this happen in the biggest and best of ways.
However, this competition came within days of the Lobster Chef Competition and being able to pull it together did not seem to look like it would happen for us. We chefs are all quite drove up during our “30 days” of summer in Maine. I had resigned that I would not get to go when I got the call: "Margaret, write your recipes, pack your lobster and your best jacket, you are going to NOLA to compete."
Within 24 hours, I had some nice clean white plates bought at Reny's for a buck each, (“real competition quality for sure”), threw some pans and a knife kit in a bag, picked up some produce essentials from Native Maine Produce, and sourced several pounds of “the Crown Jewel”: Certified Maine Lobster Meat. My sous chef son was not available to go with me on such short notice, so I grabbed a lobster broker, fitted him with a chef’s jacket, and extracted a promise from him to behave and at least try to look like he knew what he was doing. And off we headed to the Big Easy….
(Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of this story!)
Margaret Salt McLellan is Executive Chef of Linda Bean's Perfect Maine and 2008 Maine Lobster Chef of the Year
