Chef Laurine's Stew

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.

Ultimately, we served happy guests, too. One woman even asked to take leftover pasta salad back to her bunker. But despite this warm reception on the buffet line, Preeti and I were fairly ready for what came next; we were both called to judge’s table in the bottom three. On the one hand, we got feedback on our food, which never happens when you coast through in the middle. On the other hand, it was brutal for both of us. The judges asked us over and over, “Who decided to make the pasta salad?” They became infuriated because they wanted someone to point the finger. We had agreed before deliberation that we would stick together, no matter what, and claim equal responsibility, and this became increasingly difficult when the judges threatened to send us both home. But we stood our ground, still feeling strongly united. I would have been okay going home for that pasta salad, because it was half my dish and I’m more concerned with maintaining some integrity, than with winning this thing, no holds barred. I’d just served 300 soldiers a well rounded meal, after all, which is no small feat. I had plenty to be proud of.

My first experience in the bottom three reminds me of the story of Edmund Hillary and the sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, the first men to climb Everest. Though they were asked who reached the summit first, neither would say who was first because of how intrinsically collaborative the act of climbing is. The matter of who reached the top first is an irrelevant detail as both men relied equally upon one another for the duration of the climb.

Preeti and I didn’t climb Everest, but this elimination challenge felt similarly cooperative. Neither contributed more or less because neither of us could have individually prepared that pasta salad for 300 people in the alotted four hours. It was absolutely a joint effort. And I’ll have you know, we’ve discussed the potential for a pasta salad cookbook.

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