Italian food? Challenge accepted.

I really like food. Now, I know that does not make me very different from most people, but do not take those four words lightly.

Now when I say I like food, I REALLY like all aspects of food; eating food is a small part of the experience. For me, cooking food is even more satisfying than eating it. I’m that person who insists that we sit near the clear kitchen windows of fancy restaurants so I can watch the chefs work their magic. I’m also that family member that hogs space on the DVR with cooking shows like “Iron Chef America” and “Restaurant Impossible.” So naturally, when I found out that my Lifestyles editors decided to do a cultural cook-off, I knew I had to participate.

Sophomore Deepthi Sampathkumar and I were chosen to cook Italian food for the competition. Some of you may have “aww-ed” just now at reading about the poor Indian girl who had to broaden her horizons and cook Italian food for a newspaper project. However, I have fooled you; Italian food is one of my favorites to eat and make.

I’ll be honest, I was wary when my editors told me I would be working with Deepthi. It had nothing to do with her; I just hate sharing the kitchen.

I probably get this from my mother who always denies me access to her culinary sanctuary whenever she is concocting something delicious, like curry. Regardless, I was determined to try something new by working together with Deepthi, and used all of my self-control to avoid booting her out of the kitchen and making her an enemy that I would awkwardly have a class with for the rest of the year.

After severe confusion regarding the meeting time of our cooking session, Deepthi arrived to my house at 5:30 p.m., not without running around our local Safeway to acquire all of the items on our grocery list. We started with making the tiramisu, the dessert we ‘decided’ on, so that it would have time to set.

The process ran pretty smoothly, and we managed to finish making the cake in about an hour. We were only slowed down by a few distractions, one of them being that we may or may not have taken breaks to eat more ladyfingers than we actually put into our dish.

After we safely stored the dessert away, we began to work on the multi-step process of making the vegetable lasagna, our main course. At this point in the evening, around 7 p.m., my mother began to creep into the kitchen and pressured us to quickly finish our shenanigans so that she could start cooking dinner.

Deepthi and I worked surprisingly well under pressure; we cut vegetables while dancing to the rap music that Deepthi insisted we listen to, and somewhat patiently stirred our bechamel sauce for 20 minutes on the stove. (There was much yelling of “How can milk take that long to thicken?”)

After we got our three components ready: the sauteed vegetable mixture, the bechamel sauce and the pesto ricotta paste, we assembled the lasagna. I’m not going to lie, it looked pretty gross. The wrinkly no-boil noodles were covered with a sticky white sauce on top of which was a chunky green mixture covering the vegetables. I was worried that our presentation would cost us some points.

However, when judgement day arrived, all of my worries went away. When Deepthi arrived to the Journalism Room where the judging took place with our freshly baked lasagna in hand, there were many “oohs” and “ahs” at our extremely aromatic foil container. We opened it to show everyone that it wasn’t just an incredibly good-smelling piece of foil, and someone shouted, “Oh! You guys made a casserole!” It wasn’t the reaction I was hoping for, but I’ll take what I can get.

My ego was boosted when we opened up the tiramisu. As soon as the cocoa powder covered whipped cream was visible, a few judges told me “I’m giving you a 10/10 already.”

I couldn’t wait for my editors to announce the winner of the competition. So obviously, the logical thing to do was stalk the Saratoga Falcon server to find the spreadsheet with the judges’ tallies and discover the winner myself. Upon finding the results, I realized that only two of the judges kept their promise to give us the highest score. What happened to honesty being the best policy?

I was extremely disappointed to find Deepthi and me in second place. How could this happen? Our dishes were obviously superior to all others. As I looked on the individual scoring from the judges, I saw that

Deepthi and I were neck and neck with the Korean team, until one judge gave us a two. A TWO? OUT OF 10? We averaged a nine out of 10 for all of the other judges; this was unacceptable!

To prevent ourselves from starting a revolt of hate toward this individual (you know who you are), Deepthi and I came to a conclusion: He obviously tasted our food and was so jealous of our abilities to create such wonderful edible items that he couldn’t stand admitting that we were the winners.

In all, this was a learning experience for me. I managed to not kick Deepthi out of the kitchen and actually worked together with her to make our delicious items. This was also a chance for me to make a new friend in Deepthi, and a new enemy in that unnamed judge.

We later found out that one judge procrastinated on adding in his scores to the spreadsheet, and that his addition of a high score for us and a low score for the Korean BBQ group made us the true winners of the competition. I mean, we weren’t surprised to find ourselves in first place, but it was nice to have our talents recognized.