day 55: fabricating offal and game; sweetbread and squab marsala, braised rabbit leg with rabbit stuffed ravioli, and asian style sweetbread stir-fry over egg noodles

Today's Iron Chef challenge was the most exciting thing we've done in school so far. In teams of five, we had to come up with three dishes that all incorporated sweetbreads, one that had to incorporate rabbit, one that had to incorporate squab, and one that had a rolled and filled pasta.

First, Chef Pastore introduces us to sweetbreads, which are prepared almost exactly the same way our liver was yesterday.

He fabricates a squab, which is just like a smaller chicken, and sears it pretty quickly to about medium.

He plates this over some fava beans and a delicious balsamic reduction sauce.

For one of our plates, I came up with an asian stir fry with the sweetbreads in place of tofu. I would have liked to have gotten a nice orange glaze over the sweetbreads, but the whole last half hour really flew by. James came up with the great idea to roll out some egg noodles when we couldn't find any rice. In the stir fry are leeks, onions, tomatoes, yellow peppers, garlic, ginger, and oranges. Juliana prepped all my veg and mise, and I could not not have done this without her.

Our next dish is a sweetbread and squab marsala. Jeremy made a great marsala sauce, but Chef's critique was that the marsala was too overpowering for delicate flavors like sweetbread and squab. I just thought it was natural since we dusted our sweetbreads with flour and pan fried them just like our chicken breast. I thought this was an excellent dish. Sohl made some really great garlic roasted potatoes for this plate, too.

Our last dish, I'm going to agree with Chef that it really had no direction. You've got a braised rabbit leg, some pan-fried sweetbreads, and some ravioli with a cheesy bechamel. It was nice that we diced and sauteed our rabbit for the ravioli, but the plate as a whole doesn't really come together in any way. Also, as much as our entire team loved Jeremy's cheesy sauce, the flavor was quite intense, and subtlety and balance really flew out the window on this one. Ah well, a hit and a miss. Fun day though!