The morning of the air force challenge, I woke up a bit tired (it was still dark out!) feeling really excited about our day. We’d be preparing food for 300 men and women stationed out of Nellis Air Force Base, and we’d be working all together, as a team. Preeti and I both had catering experience, which seemed advantageous for the challenge where we were cooking for the Air Force. As a group, we had planned a strong lunch buffet with plenty of variety for the military crowd.

I quickly realized that we were actually cooking for the judges, not the service men and women. Turns out this was a team competition, whatever that means, not a team-building exercise, and even though we did well as a team, one soldier–or, chef, got left behind anyway.

Before seeing any of the products we’d be working with, the group decided that the Preeti and I would prepare a cold salad of some sort to round out the rest of the menu on what would likely be another blistering Las Vegas day. Upon arrival in the base’s kitchen, however, we found the quality of ingredients to be very low. A tricky hurdle to jump, when you’ve planned to make a cold salad. Although pasta salad seemed like a good choice initially, the pasta itself was so generic that it lost its shape and looked more like wrinkled rectangles than bow ties in our finished dish.

We were competing for Top Chef and had just made shapeless pasta salad. I was embarrassed. And Preeti was a total team player through all of this. As I was growing increasingly doubtful, she pointed out how well-suited our dish was for the time of day, location and weather. We could be thankful for at least one thing: at least we weren’t serving hot bowls of clam chowder in that heat.

» Read more: Together in Pasta Salad: the Integrity of the Team