Day 9: Cooking

This was our last challenge. Heading into this it was a foregone conclusion who the winner was going to be.  One team had the skill and the hustle to dominate every challenge and their win was secure. For the rest of us, it was a tense battle for second and third place (which came with actual prizes).  

We had the option of risking a large number of points on the outcome of this last challenge and since we knew it was a cooking challenge, we decided to bet on Russell's skills to carry us through.  Spoiler alert, R’s skills were not enough to overcome the curve balls thrown at us.  

We were taken to a woman's home where she runs cooking classes out of her house. It was very charming. 

We made two kinds of stuffed pasta (ravioli and tortelli)  and a local dessert (kind of a cross between a cake and a cookie).  Mixing and rolling out the pasta dough was nothing unusual, although we are not used to rolling out the dough using a hand crank. 

The tricky part came when she demonstrated how to make the ravioli and then told us we each had to do it by ourselves, blindfolded guided by our partner only talking.  The tortelli had a similar challenge: we had to stuff and fold up the dumpling one handed. Using our non-dominant hand. 

The dessert challenge was different, in that we were given ingredients we had to include (butter, flour, sugar - in the correct amounts) and then had to figure what else to add, given a range of options. Funnily enough, there were only three missing ingredients: eggs, Marsala (or white wine), and yeast. While many teams (including us) got the first two, not a single team added yeast. Which is funny because I for one have made cookies without including a leavening agent and I know they didn't work.  I will chalk it up to sleep deprivation and heat exhaustion. 

The heat was really hitting us and by the end where they cooked us lunch, including our pasta creations (which weren't bad - just a little lumpy) many of us were too exhausted and overheated to even taste them.Read more