This weekend was Iron Chef Battle Citrus. The chairman's choice of citrus was not well received by some of the competitors, but the challenge was on.

Here's how I sized up the teams:

Team 1: Selina and Allan
The rookies. No cooking experience at all. Watching Rachel Ray on tv can only teach you so much.

Team 2: Garson and Peony
This team could have potential. We knew Gars had some cooking skills. All Peony knew about cooking she learned from playing Cooking Mama on her DS.

Team 3: Cal and Roger
I had no problems with Roger as my teammate. I heard that he could make beef stroganoff and lasgana. We felt pretty confident that we would win.

Roger and I got to Safeway and started making our plans. He had some southwest style chicken corn chowder with lime recipe in mind. I wanted to deep fry some appetizer (wontons/spring rolls)and make a citrus sauce for it. For dessert, Roger wanted to make some kind of fancy lemon cookie.

We were using the kitchen at my parent's house. We decided to chill and have a few root beers before we got to the heavy cooking. Besides, we figured we were the favorites going in and could relax a bit. Then we started getting all the stuff ready for the soup. There was a lot more prep work for this than I had thought. We had to bribe my brother with bacon to get him to wrap a few wontons for us. We were running out of time to finish the dessert. We were rushing to transport all the food over to another house for judging. I knew this would hurt our presentation points a bit, but I was banking on the fact that our food would probably taste the best.

The other teams were already there and their plates looked all nice and neat. Danny, David, and Shirley had bravely volunteered to risk their taste buds and possibily their lives to be our judges for the night. They tasted all the food, marked their scorecards, and then had a secret meeting for what seemed like an hour. I was hoping it wasn't because they got sick from eating something.

The winners: Allan and Selina! It was thought to be an upset by the rookies, but they actually did have the coolest looking dishes on the table. Of course, we finished last, even behind the Cooking Mama.

Our loss was probably because our lemon cookie thing was kind of weak. The chowder turned out really good, but I think it was too labor intensive for the time allowed. Or maybe we should have been cooking instead of chugging root beer, watching NASCAR, and checking hockey scores.

In any case, it was fun. Congrats to the winners. I just wish I could have made garlic ice cream though.