Wednesday, February 17, 2016

When you can consider a failure a success

I think I'm pretty normal (pause wait for the fits of laughter to subside) but no really I think that generally speaking I'm fairly normal in terms of my fears, thoughts and feelings.

I've said its before and I will say it again - I come across as a person with a lot of confidence but usually I'm shaking in my boots waiting for the moment I can crawl back into a hiding spot and cry - like honestly I am terrified of failure and particularly public failure. It is one of the reasons why being public about my challenge is very scary - I'm terrified to fail and to fail publicly. However, I need to find a way to get over that in life. 

In any event one of the things that has been driving me in life has been the desire to compete on MasterChef Canada - I think I could and I have also been told that I could probably do this by several people. However, there have been vocal people (my parents) who have actually said that they didn't think I could do this because I depend too much on recipes and I don't have enough creativity or knowledge on my own. (Don't even get me started on that... I do follow a recipe very closely the first time I am making something from a recipe or when I am baking). 

My husband - who is my biggest supporter - thinks I could kick ass but also doesn't think I am ready yet.  He says I'm not ready because I need to start working on some of the challenge type things they have you focus on during the show and develop some of my other skills. So one of the things he said I should start trying is having a time limit and no recipe and then thinking on my feet about what to make. So that is exactly what I did! 

I set myself a 30 minute time limit and had no plan to start. So I looked in the fridge - I had a whole chicken, head of cauliflower and potatoes.  So I knew I wanted to do a roasted cauliflower puree, potatoes and chicken breasts. 

I started with the roast cauliflower - I cut down the head into florets and spread them on a cookie sheet. I found some indian spices that were speaking to me and put that in some olive oil and then tossed the cauliflower in the oil and spices. I threw them in the oven at 350F to roast. 

I started in on the potatoes - peeling, cutting into small chunks and into well salted boiling water. 

I then broke down the chicken - cutting off the wings and legs followed by the breasts. I used a cast iron ban with hot oil before putting the well seasoned chicken breasts into the pan, to add flavour I used lemon and orange juice over the chicken with some garlic to flavour the chicken.

Now I definitely went over the 30 minutes I had set out for myself and that largely had to do with my plan.  I should have started with the chicken and then worked my way to potatoes and then cauliflower. Shortening the cooking time by cutting the potatoes smaller and turning up the heat on the oven (I could have also skipped cutting up the cauliflower and done slices of the head because they were being pureed anyways). I wanted some veggies so I marinated onions and carrot in some olive oil with some salt and pepper.  

The food in and of itself tasted amazing. However, when plating I realized that I had two mashed/pureed items on the plate and I should have left something whole to give different textures.  So while a failure in terms of textures on the plate and having it poorly composed - the food itself was amazing. 

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