Trying out for Master Chef

Here’s a post by Julianne Lee at Book View Cafe:

So I decided to bop down to the audition in Nashville one Saturday. I’d been cooking for family since I was eleven, and I figured with forty-five years of experience behind me I might have a shot at this. I, too, am a character and there is no reason I shouldn’t fit in with the folks in that competition. The worst that could happen is that they could sneer at me like Ramsay and his buddies often do, and send me home. I’ve been sneered at; they don’t scare me.

She made a fancy pumpkin pie, and got a nice comment about it. Sounds like an interesting and kind of fun experience. Click through and read the whole thing if you’re interested in what that was like.

I will add, I remain unpersuaded that Brussels sprouts can be made edible, no matter how cute they look in the store or one the table. I realize some of you here are going to jump in and say no no, Brussels sprouts are tasty! Yeah, sure. I like all the other cabbage-family plants, I think, but not that one.

Now, separate question: If you decided to try out for a cooking show — never mind how utterly implausible that might be — what would you make to bring to the audition?

I would never choose pumpkin pie. I’m the take-it-or-leave-it type when it comes to all things pumpkin.

It would need to be something that tasted great AND was pretty on the plate. I might make some sort of fancy cookie. There are these ultra-thin, ultra-rich almond cookies with a dark chocolate layer. They’re probably not fancy enough, but they’re pretty amazingly good. Let me see, hmm, this caramel spiral cookie is pretty consistently one of the absolute favorites no matter how many different varieties of cookies I make. Still not at fancy as a lot of other cookies, though.

There’s a pie I like a lot: pastry crust, thin layer of raspberry, then a cheesecake layer, then a thin chocolate layer.

I’ve made a particularly good layer cake that uses quite a bit of almond flour along with ordinary cake flour, with apricot filling. I wouldn’t make a layer cake for something like this, though. You can’t tell FOR SURE that you didn’t overbake the cake layers until you cut the cake.

There’s this quite wonderful lemon-curd-filled shortbread … oh, I posted this recipe before. Here it is. This is actually very easy.

Obviously my mind turns toward desserts, but the Spinach Khachapuri at the same post were also really good. I might actually think about making something like that. In fact, now that I’m looking at this post, I have a deep, deep desire to make both spinach khachapuris and lemon-curd-filled shortbread again as soon as possible.

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