Cooking Cup 2009 - The Story

After a good night´s sleep, I´ve sorted through my thoughts and the pictures taken, and sure want to keep my promise of giving you the inside scoop, so here we go.

I started at home at 8.30 a.m. to drive the 300k to Hannover. The night before, I bought my share of ingredients, and my co-cooker did, too. So when we met, we had enough time to prepare the Rosenberger Garnelen we had bought. Funny things, their legs are so long! They are kinda like "scampi XXL" - they can be up to 25cm long. Ours were medium-sized, perfect to top the fillet of beef in our Surf&Turf dish. Meet one of our funny friends here:

When we were done preparing and checking over and over again whether we hadn´t forgotten anything, we started the 60k drive to Braunschweig were the preliminals were held. We were first to arrive, and instantly started sneaking around the test kitchen we were supposed to cook in:

Since the Cooking Cup is sponsored by Siemens, the preliminals are held in certified Siemens Live Cooking Schools all across the country. Brandnew, induction cooking - which turned out to be the first problem: the pan I brought from home was not compatible with the stove top. Bummer. But oh well, life is full of surprises...

The other two teams arrived shortly afterwards: two female friends, 40-something, and an old man with a female friend, 70-something. The dishes sounded interesting: "Sole roll with cocoa pasta, coconut sauce and mango compote" (Team 70), and "Meat wedding Fish" (Team 40).

We were up first for cooking, so we went for it. Everything went well, we got along great, and kept the time limit. But, unfortunately, my co-cooker forgot to put the sauce on the plates. That really sucked, especially because the Jury said that in the end that could have made the difference. But - nothing you can do about it when it´s over, except for learning from it for the future! This is what our dish looked like in the end:


Next up was Team 70. Boy, had they trouble with their pasta dough - it was way too dry and kept falling apart. But they, too, made their dish in time:

Unfortunately, it sounded much better than it tasted, so they came in 3rd place.

Last but not least, Team 40: they have already taken part in the Cooking Cup several times, but never made it to the semi-final yet. Their dish was the greatest surprise because of the non-telling name "Meat wedding Fish". They made a veal roll, pastry stars, orange sauce, salad w/balsamic dressing, seared scallops and crumb-coated green and red tomatoes.


The Jury liked the joint of californian and mediterranean cuisines. So Congratulations to Christine and Martina - I wish you all the best for the semi-final on September 11th!

There is a slight chance for us of moving up to the semi-finals as well - the best second runner-ups will be nominated subsequently when all the preliminals are over. I´ll keep in touch regarding this point :)
To sooth away the losing pain, we were spoiled with some nice goodies: a Porsche design toaster, a collection of Gallo wines, and Seeberger is sending us a basket filled with dried fruits and nuts.
That really makes you feel better, let me tell you. So if you live in Germany, you might want to look out for next year´s competition - it is really a great experience.