Sometimes, the universe conspires against you.
This weekend, my mother and I had the combined honour and misfortune to be participants in the Ag. Society's cook-off, part of the epic harvest fair hosted at the museum this past Saturday.
The Iron Chef-style competition pits pairs against one another with a basket of secret ingredients revealed right before the two-hour competition begins. With nothing more than a bit of creativity and a table full of ingredients, the teams are required to whip up a feast of suitable culinary delights.
This is the second time my mother has made the long journey from Wainwright to participate in this competition. Last year, the Ag. Society held a similar one during the harvest fair. There, the secret ingredients were a delicious selection of strawberries, beets, garlic and zuccini.
Just imagine the delicious offerings we were able to whip up with those options. We presented the judges with chilled strawberry and cucumber soup, grilled zuccini, maple whipped cream over raspberries and strawberries, lightly flavoured with lemon zest.
This year, we weren't so lucky with our secret ingredients.
Culinary delights are much easier to imagine when you're not forced to work with chicken gizzards, salted pork, carrots and kohlrabi, just for the record.
Things started off badly and proceeded to get epically worse.
My mother's blender—her pride and joy, a brand new Ninja—failed to turn on despite my coaxing, leaving my deliciously designed dessert of oranges, carrots, kohlrabi, chocolate sauce and crushed ladyfingers to sit and stew in its own juices in the blazing sun while organizers fetched a food processor to help us out.
While it was stewing in the sunshine, my mother somehow made a bottle of birch beer explode in an epic fountain, splashing the top of the tent and raining down on us both. Throughout the course of the morning, every now and again a drop would land on me and I'd think it was raining.
Sticky and filled with despair after my dessert came out looking more like vomit than the fruity, chocolatey delight I had imagined, I sadly threw it out and went about preparing something simpler.
I tried to fry up some biscuits to go with the soup my mom was carefully preparing. I flavoured them with, of course, shredded carrot and kohlrabi, tossed in some cranberries and birch beer, and watched in despair as they sucked up all the oil and turned into soggy disasters. They, too, joined the vomit-dessert in our garbage bucket.
I spent the remaining hour on the clock obsessively pureeing the remaining roots and soaking some lemons and limes in ice water flavoured with a sugar syrup I'd made on the stove. I added some ice cubes, cranberries, birch beer (because if I was going to wear it all day, by God, I was going to use it to make something delicious!) juice squeezed from an orange and pomegranate juice. A little sour, I sweetened the slushy beverage with locally-produced honey and blended it until a sip wouldn't leave the drinker chewing bits of carrot with a puzzled look on their face.
Two hours of agony, stickiness and despair, and a few glasses of slushy, strangely-flavoured beverage were all I had to show for it.
My mother performed admirably with the disgusting bits of meat, which I had refused to look at, let alone attempt to cook. She made shredded salted pork over beet, carrot and kohlrabi coleslaw, a strange soup which I stabbed with a spoon until all the grizzly chicken organs sunk and I didn't have to look at them and mushrooms stuffed with carrots and cranberries.
We didn't think much of our chances going into the judging.
Still, I didn't expect to be mauled during the process. As a final indignity, while watching the judges taste test our lovingly prepared offerings, pain like I had never known tore through my arm. It felt pretty much the way I'd always thought having a shark tear my arm off might feel.
It was, of course, a wasp, drawn to the sticky sweet mess of birch beer on my arm.
I handled the pain like a champion – I didn't even cry. I howled and flailed around in shock and betrayal, of course, but I didn't cry. I'll take that as a win, the only one in store for me that day.
So, we didn't win. We weren't surprised. Maybe if we weren't so grossed out, we'd have taste-tested our food before offering it to the judges.
But I have no regrets on that score.
Hours later, after my mother got home, she texted me to inform me that her blender, the Ninja that had betrayed us, had worked perfectly when she'd got it home.
“The universe conspired against us,” she said.
And it's true.
