Hey Blog! This blog is about the annual Scout cooking competition!
This competition was a Scouts one. Every year the Belper district has a Ready Steady Cook! Challenge, with two parts to it. First is a troop stage, when two or three teams from each troop compete till the leaders decide who should go on to the district round, where the best team wins the trophy. This trophy is a chopping board! My troop, 1st Belper, won last year, though I was not on the team – the team I was on did not make it past the judges’ test. However, this year we did!
We only made the main meal in the first stage but there were only two teams taking part in the initial stage so it wasn’t too hard to win. The main was so good, the judges (scout leaders) let us in to the district round, which was yesterday!
The meal specifications were a three-course meal for two people, Asian-inspired, that cost less than ten pounds. We decided to cook sweet-and-sour chicken noodles, with prawn sesame toast for a starter, and eight treasures rice for a pudding. For those wondering what eight treasures rice is, it is a Chinese rice pudding, normally served hot but passible to serve cold, with eight different kinds of dried fruit as a filling. Made like a Christmas Pud, most people who came round to our table thought it like a Chinese version of the classic pudding; it is very good as I generally don’t like cold rice puddings, but I kept going back again and again for this one!
The pudding could be made in advance – by me, in this case, as we had the recipe – but the starter and main had to be made there on the day. We had also practiced the starter, so I took charge of that. It wasn’t too difficult, but with only 1 and a half hours to do the entire thing, it was a task. The other two on my team tackled the main. The sauce had to be cooked first, and then added to the chicken and noodles. Luckily, there were a couple of no-shows on the day, so we were able to commandeer a spare table and serve on that, as our table was supremely messy after cooking! Here is a photo of the meal:
The judges gave some excellent comments, but I think the most important fact was that our meal disappeared faster than anybody else’s! This could be due to the fact that we had more of it than anybody else’s, or that ours was better! My pudding disappeared fastest of the lot. The judging takes a surprisingly short time, but while the all-important conference was happening, people got to taste their own and other’s food. When the verdict came, we hadn’t won – Duffield Scouts had won – but Mum has just seen a post on the Facebook page for Scouts from the local Scout District Commissioner saying, “That pudding was amazing!” so I don’t mind!