My friend Adam threw an inventive birthday party for his girlfriend Meredith this weekend: he held an Iron Chef competition.  We split up into groups and had about four hours to research recipes, go shopping, and put together a minimum of three dishes--all of which had to use a mystery ingredient as their common thread.  The mystery ingredient turned out to be squash.

Adam was dressed for the occasion:

To say that cooking competitions aren’t my comfort zone is like saying that Joan Rivers has had a little work done to her face.  I can follow a recipe--if it’s a simple, basic recipe that involves two ingredients, cereal and milk--but I don’t have creative instinct that’s required for this sort of thing.  My primary creative contribution was to suggest that we take our bag full of squash, go to the pub, order some pitchers, and put the squash in it.  We may not win the competition, but we’d have more fun than the other teams.

If you’re curious about what my comfort zone actually is, I think it would be sleep.  I’d like to see an Iron Sleep competition sometime.  There would be no rules.  Why would you need rules?  Everyone would be asleep.

Fortunately, I had one amazing chef and two highly competent ones on my team, so I let them carry me.  I said to one of my co-chefs, Elizabeth, that I needed help slicing up the pumpkin because “I’ve never carved up a pumpkin unless I was trying to give it a face and stick a candle in it.”

She said, “Hahaha!  Greg, you are funny.”

I said, ”I’m completely serious.  How the hell do you chop up a pumpkin?”

And so on.  In the course of the afternoon, I did a lot of chopping.  If I was a cowboy, I would have been Chopalong Cassidy.  If I had been a composer, I would have been Chopin.  If I had been a building, I would have been a Chopping Mall.  What I’m saying is, I did some chopping.

The end result was an amazing squash curry:

By the way, I chopped the green beans in that curry.  The length of the green beans is extremely important for the delicate balance of complex flavors to be found in said curry.  The wrong quotient of green beans can completely destroy a meal.  For example, if you put too many--or, in fact, any--in a bowl of cereal, you ruin the bowl of cereal.  Yes.  I know stuff.  Suck on it, Williams and/or Sonoma.

We also made a pasta type thing, and bunch of delicious pumpkin muffins, bread pudding style, that you could dip into caramel and stuff your face with:

We won the competition and each received a silver statue and an Iron Chef apron.  And as the winners were announced, I realized that I felt absolutely no guilt.  It’s good to receive prizes and accolades for being in the right place at the right time, letting others do the hard part.  Think of all the great people throughout history who have done the same thing:

Dan Quayle!

Harriet Miers!

Andrew Ridgley!

Art Garfunkel!

Bert!

I’m proud to be one of their number.