A Taste of Elegance

Tonight Becca & I went to a fun local tradition, for the first time, A Taste of Elegance.  It's put on by the Pork Producers Associations & my friend Nicki's husband had an entry.  He's an executive chef at a local restaurant, and he is AMAZING!  


I picked up Becks at 4:30 & we headed the couple of blocks to the convention center at a local casino, where the dinner was held.  First of all, the lobby is beautiful!  And has comfy chairs.  :)  

We were some of the first to arrive, so we got to walk around & check out the set up before it got crowded.  And it did get crowded - by the end of the night it was a full house!!  Which is great, as the donation at the door was for a local college's Junior Chefs programme.  The chefs had submitted their dishes for judging earlier in the day, and the plating was beautiful.  They weren't ready to serve until 5:30, so we chatted w/ Doug & decided to get dessert first.

Many varieties of cheesecake!  Raspberry, lemon, amaretto, chocolate chip, regular cheesecake, chocolate espresso... I tried the lemon, raspberry & amaretto.  The raspberry was toooooo raspberry-y, the lemon didn't have enough lemon.  The amaretto, tho, was perfection!  Cherry-like goodness.  : )   I admit it, I had two.  Becca's favorite was the chocolate chip.  She said it was, "Really creamy and light.  Everything you expect a cheesecake to be."  


Finally, we saw that ppl were starting to plate up at their stations, so we joined in the queues.  We didn't start with dish 1 & go in order, but that's how I'm going to blog it because this is going to be a series of posts this week.  There were 10 dishes plus dessert, and if I did it all in one post, it would just be too long.  You would all get bored reading about it, and your kids would want your attention, and dinner would burn, and oh my heck what just happened on Big Brother??  Heh.


So, tonight's post is about dessert and Dish #1. 

Dish #1 was a chorizo sausage with potato served by Chef Dominick De Leon of Sunnybrook Assisted Living.  I was not a fan of this dish.  There was something in the flavor I didn't enjoy.  Becca, however, really liked it.  She said it was probably the chorizo I didn't like, which is true.  The carrot was perfect, tho.  ; )  


Notice how the judged dish looks all pretty & ours ... not so much.  *laugh*  The judges based their scores on taste (50 pts), appearance (30 pts) and originality (20 pts).  For People's Choice, we pretty much did the same thing... Heh.  Which is why I was surprised at how many competitors didn't make their plates pretty... But you'll see as we go along this week!  


Until next time - have you been to a dinner like this?  What did you like about it?  Do share!!  : )