Thursday, November 20th - A Top Chef At Sea Kind of Day!

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With our port days done, I was really glad to have the Top Chef activities on board! This is what we sailed for so we were really looking forward to this!

Today we had our cooking class booked, and we chose to cook with Hosea. But before that was the Quickfire Challenge! So two Top Chef events today! And of course we needed to balance that with the ever important quality "sun" time! 

By now, I think most people, or at least a good majority of the ship was aware that this was a Top Chef cruise. So when it came to the Quickfire, it was a full house!

The Quickfire was a chance for the passengers to cook onstage and also cook with the Top Chefs....they used a raffle ticket system to choose 8 passengers, which I thought was a really fair way to make the selections.

The stage was set with 4 stations...


The chef's were introduced and the passengers were selected and the "rules" of the contest were given





In the first round, there were 4 teams of 2 with a Top Chef "guide" sort of. Each team had to complete a few cooking tasks, like whipping egg whites to stiff peaks, grating cheese, juicing oranges, etc...their chef could talk them through it, but not help them. The first team to complete each task won that round.






The winners moved on to a cook off round!

So....the winning team was then split up to cook off against one another. Each person got to choose a Top Chef to work with and they had a protein. If I remember, they chose either steak or fish and whichever they chose, the opposite was what they had to use.  A little twist thrown in there! They both had the same protein. And they had a small set of ingredients. BUT they had to use all of the ingredients from the first round...so the whipped egg whites, the cheese, the orange juice, and whatever else they had to do over there.

They had I think 20 or 30 minutes to prepare a meal that was judged by the other 2 Top Chefs and an audience member.

It was really a lot of fun to watch, and I'm sure even more fun for the participants! I don't think I would have been able to cook under that kind of pressure!

After the challenge we got ready for our cooking lesson with Hosea...this was quite the top chef day! 

Just a quick shot of the library on the ship - I do think they have a really nice library area!

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