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What my station looked like about

halfway through service that night.

Yes, I was busy.

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After the jump…a special National Geographic style Super Photo Round-Up…

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Instead of maple butter or olive oil for the bread, I

made Broccoli Butter. It was fun but,

like peach schnapps, it’s only good once. You don’t

want to be eating it all the time.

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What Alton Brown thinks are the only

two things I serve at Dirt Candy: broccoli and butter.

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Broccoli mousse coming out of its molds.

It really is that kryptonite green.

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Two out of the three parts

of Broccoli Stalks Three Ways: broccoli almond

mousse, and broccoli avocado crudo with

thai chilis.

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Bad photo – sorry! In the middle that’s the third

part: crispy broccoli stalks with broccoli sprouts.

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Broccoli Chowder with a Smoked Cheddar

Biscuit and Pickled Broccoli and Cauliflower.

And its evil twin lurking behind it.

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The pickles were really good for a quick

pickle. In the kitchen everyone kept

snarfing them down all night.

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And by “snarf” I don’t mean the comic

relief from Thundercats. I mean “eat.”.

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The Broccolini Fettuccine with a tempura poached egg..

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For Dirt Candy this is a really simple dish,

only two main elements. But when we tasted it

again on Thursday we all realized that whether by accident

or design this dish is like a freight train

made of broccoli smashing you in the mouth.

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The dining room around 5:50 or so. I bet you

don’t see Morimoto out on the floor like this!

Now that’s dedication.

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The Crispy Tofu that’s on the menu now was

created for Iron Chef. It’s my ode to the classic

Chinese take-out dish: orange beef & broccoli.

On the show the dehydrated and powdered orange peel wasn’t

a part of the dish, so it wasn’t there Thursday night either.

I’m a purist, in every self-defeating sense of the word.

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Everyone crammed into the kitchen turning

out food. These dinners are hell on the kitchen

but they’re so much fun it’s hard to quit them.

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Steamed Rice and Broccoli: Broccoli Ice Cream with Crispy

Puffed Rice, Orange Caramel Sauce and Corn Brittle.

This is my take on broccoli and brown rice,

the stereotypical vegetarian meal. But of course,

….THE JUDGES DECIDED MORIMOTO’S

SUSHI WAS MORE CREATIVE!!!!!!

SUSHI? FOR REAL? AND HE BEAT ME ON ORIGINALITY????

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Ahem, excuse me.

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Carrot Caramel Sauce looking downright radioactive.

But trust me, it’s just carrots and caramel.

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The late seating. Hard to see, but these judges

actually paid me and they didn’t say mean

things about my food. I like them better

than the other judges. They’re more

affirming.

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Big thank yous to everyone who came and made this as fun as it was. After I’m on my next reality show – Intervention – you’re all invited back for a themed dinner then, too!

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Appearing on the Time Warner

cable guide was its own reward.

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The viewing party was absolutely great and I can’t believe how excited everyone was, even after the show was over. Douglas Richard and Clarice Martin drove up from West Point to watch, my wine reps – Owen and Camille – both came, Roopa and Matt made hundreds of tiny cupcakes, Erin brought me okra pickles, tons of friends, my parents, and lots of familiar faces from Dirt Candy all showed up and were the best cheering section a girl could want. There were even some press people who I’ve made friends with from covering the restaurant who came to hang out and watch – which is especially amazing because press people are normally in their coffins by 9pm since they start drinking around noon. (Note: if you are Canadian, I am so sorry that Food Network Canada isn’t airing the show. Why do they punish you for living in the world’s greatest, most maple-flavored country? Please let Prime Minister Harper know that we cannot stand for this treatment!) (Also: a huge thanks to Angels and Kings on 11th and A who let us swarm their bar for the evening and were very gentlemanly about everything.)

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This is a swarm, Dirt Candy style.

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Watching the show brought a few things to mind:

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1) The butter thing. Alton Brown and Kevin Brauch were a lot of fun to joke around with and the camera crews and floor crew had a great time playing with us. We were a lot less solemn than Morimoto’s side and so they gave the three of us a lot of camera time. The butter thing was a joke we kept kicking back and forth and it was funny, but I feel like it wound up taking over the show. And it wasn’t even accurate. Jesus, Danielle and I are good at what we do but we can’t cook for only three people. So when Jesus was making the beurre blanc sauce with all that butter at the end, he was making it in the proportion we use at the restaurant, which is enough for at least 30 servings. Unfortunately, we wound up throwing out a lot of what we made on Iron Chef because it was easier to cook in the proportions we knew, rather than figure out proportions all over again.

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I know my vegan customers, and I know that they’re awesome people with well-developed senses of humor, but one thing that bothered me is that I’ve tried really hard to make sure everyone feels welcome at Dirt Candy and I worry that the focus on how much butter we used is going to alienate some folks. If you’re vegan and you’re reading this, just know that I don’t care about your health, I will destroy you with some of the richest most drool-inspiring vegetarian food you’ve ever had, and I don’t need butter to do it. Trust me: I have a mighty arsenal of weapons that I can use to put your soul into food shock and nine out of ten of them don’t involve dairy.

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The crowd is shocked to see that Jesus,

Danielle and were professionally cleaned

for our Iron Chef America appearance.

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2) Jesus and Danielle looked great. Normally the three of us are in stained whites, bleeding and sweating on each other, victimizing one another with our mood swings and elbowing each other out of the way. But watching the two of them onscreen I felt really proud. Danielle looked like some kind of broccoli slinging supermodel and Jesus looked like a vegetable slicing stud. It was like working for years with Clark Kent and then turning around and suddenly seeing that they’re actually Superman.

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3) One of the hardest things to watch was myself – slicing my finger, squeaking in an ultrasonic voice pitched for bats to hear, getting my sentences edited in half – but I also was relieved to see I didn’t act like a total freak. This was me a year ago, and there are so many things I would have done differently in this challenge if I did it today. But Past Me did alright by Present Me, and I’m proud of her. Also, did anyone else catch my drag queen worthy acting at the top of the show? They asked me to make sure my reactions were big so I figured, “You want big? Let me just super-size that for you.”

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4) The judges were rough. I was so psyched to have Jeffrey Steingarten as a judge since I feel like he’s the “real” judge in the same way that I think Morimoto is the “real” Iron Chef. But I also think he was having a bad day. He just seemed irritable and out of sorts throughout the 6 hour shoot (yes, it lasted 6 hours!) and I really wanted him to engage with my food more than, “I think this tastes good. I don’t think this tastes good.” I would have loved to sit there and serve him my food and listen to him tear it apart for hours, but he didn’t seem to be feeling at his best that day. As for the other two judges, I knew I was in for it when Kelly Hu said she didn’t like fat and that she liked her broccoli “nude.” If she wants “nude” vegetables I suggest she go to a strip club – Dirt Candy doesn’t do “nude.”

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Sir Jeffrey will wither you with

an icy glare now.

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5) I wished I could have tasted Morimoto’s food. He and I did so many of the same dishes and used so many of the same techniques and I wanted to get a better sense of what he was doing. When the judges tasted his creamy dish with pickled broccoli and my creamy dish with pickled broccoli and said that it “made sense” when he did it but not when I did it, I wanted to taste what that meant. Taste can be affected by so many different factors from presentation to expectations and I wanted to taste it for myself. Was it just that he plated it differently? Did he get the benefit of the doubt because he’s cooked on Iron Chef America for 8 seasons? Or was there an actual taste difference, and if so what was it? Not being able to taste his food was the biggest bummer of the show for me.

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But overall, I’m thrilled. I do feel like I let down the team by not winning. But this was me and Jesus and Danielle one year ago. We did our best, and we went down fighting. And, to be honest, to me the biggest accomplishment was keeping my dignity (most vegetarians on reality TV get flayed alive) and having fun and having that fun come across on the show. Food is my life. I have busted my ass in hot, sweaty kitchens for twelve years, I have taken friends to the hospital for gruesome injuries they’ve gotten on the job, I am covered with burn and knife scars, I have given cooking my sweat and blood and tears and except for my marriage and my family it means more to me than anything on this planet. But that’s no reason to act like a pompous jackass about it. It has to be fun. More than anything, I want people to be surprised, to laugh and to enjoy themselves when they eat my food, and I think that came across last night.

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For the three of us, it feels like the first year of Dirt Candy is truly over now that our Iron Chef episode has aired. We are such different people making such different food than we were a year ago when this was filmed. For us, this was a chance to look back at who we were when the restaurant had just opened and we were struggling to make it work, and to raise a glass to our Past Selves and say, “Your Future Selves want you to know it’s all going to be worth it.” Because looking around that packed room, listening to people cheer and laugh and heckle, watching customers and friends and family meet each other for the first time, and get drunk together, and eat cupcakes and pizza together, it felt like everything worked out after all. It would have been nice to win, but if this is losing, it doesn’t feel so bad. If this is losing, I can live with that.

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And, like I said on the show…

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“Hey, Dirt Candy! How ya’ll roll?”

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The actual filming Iron Chef – as opposed to the preparation, the sitting around and the waiting – was bizarre. I was all jacked up on adrenaline and my nerves were jangling like alarm bells and the first thing they did was film my entrance. Inside my skull my brain is screaming with stress and I have to walk down the runway in a swirl of artificial smoke, and then hit my mark at the end and strike a pose.

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“Again,” they said.

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Then, “Again.”
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There’s no music. No direction. You feel like you’re on an episode of America’s Next Top Model strutting down a runway towards Mark Dacascos and you just keep having to do it over and over again.

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Seeing Mark Dacascos was kind of a highlight. To me he’ll always be the martial arts star from movies like DRIVE and BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF, and he was nicer than there was any reason for him to be. He kept telling me to relax, and the make-up people kept running out to touch up my make-up as I sweated it off (watch the show closely and you’ll see my lipstick change color about a dozen times) but as I walked down that runway again and again I wasn’t getting any calmer. Relaxed was not happening. It’s like when you go to take a test and all you want to do is get it over with. Everything that keeps you from starting stresses you out, and still I had to keep walking down that runway, over and over again.
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They may call you “Chairman” but you’ll

always be Mani to me.

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Finally, I guess they felt like they’d played enough head games with me, and I got to meet Morimoto for the first time, and he was super-nice. “Beauty and the Beast,” he said, referring to our pairing and I have to assume he was making me Beauty and not the Beast. We went to stand by the secret ingredient display and they wanted to rehearse the reveal a few times which means that, in true Dirt Candy style, Jesus thought we were starting and he jumped the gun and ran up to grab a big armful of the secret ingredient, about to destroy their carefully constructed placement.
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“Noooooo!!!!!” the producers screamed in slow motion, and someone managed to tackle Jesus and disaster was narrowly averted.
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And then suddenly the producers said, “Go!”
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What?!? Months of training and stress and hours of waiting and suddenly this was it. It all came down to the next 60 minutes. I was terrified. And, of course, the first thing that happened was that when we grabbed the secret ingredient we also accidentally grabbed the stands they were placed on and wound up dragging them back to our stations.
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Embarrassingly enough, the first thing that I did was grate my finger. It began to gush blood and I looked around for a glove, but didn’t know where they were. A floor person ran over and slapped a band aid on my finger, which was probably the worst thing that could have happened. Not only did I look clumsy but now I had to deal with a band aid that I was already starting to sweat off.
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For the rest of the show, I was engaged in a battle with the floor people. I’d get my hands wet and the band aid would fall off, I’d throw it away and then someone would be there to put another band aid on my finger for continuity purposes. I wanted a glove but there was no time. Things were going too fast.
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Also, those battery packs they clip onto your waistband for the radio mics are really heavy. So heavy that mine kept pulling my pants down. Throughout the show, if you see me struggling with something there’s only one thing it could be – my pants.
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Jesus did get the ultimate compliment when Alton Brown told him his knife skills were so good that he should go work for Morimoto. (Hey, wait a minute…)
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And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
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I felt like we finished with plenty of time and I felt good about what we’d done. Our plates looked great. Then I looked over at Morimoto’s plates for the first time and they looked like works of art. Maybe I could say we were doing a rustic presentation?
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It was also apparent that he and I had had similar ideas about what to cook. We were both doing a soup, we both did an ice cream (neither of which worked out that well – something may have been up with the machines) and we both did an egg dish and similar quick pickling for another dish’s garnish. I’m still depressed that we didn’t get to taste his food – I really would have liked to.
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The hardest thing was about to come, however: the judging. I went first and had to stand on a box because I’m so short. “Don’t get off this box no matter what!” I was told. And then I made a really stupid decision. They asked if I wanted to serve a wine with my food and for some reason I said no. The first thing one of the judges said to me was, “Do you not believe in wine?” By the time my second dish came out, I had wine served with it and every course thereafter but it’s an indication of how out of my mind with stress I was that I didn’t want to serve wine right from the start.
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We look like dorky tourists, but come on.

We had to take a picture on the set.

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The judging takes forever, and there I was perched on my box for the entire ordeal as the judges picked apart my food. Danielle and Jesus were sitting on the floor over in the kitchen and a bored Mark Dacascos entertained my mother who was in the audience with my dad. She wanted him to do a back flip and he told her that he’d be in trouble with the producer if he did because of liability. She kept goading him and finally, after hours of this, he did one to make her happy and instantly he was surrounded by people asking him what the hell he was doing and he’d better not be doing back flips on the floor again because didn’t he know anything about liability.
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Then they were finished tearing me apart and while Morimoto did his judging (and flirting – the guy is a huge flirt) we all hung out with the floor crew, chatting with the camera guys and giving them whatever food we had left over (at this point, everyone was starving). The judging wrapped up (they don’t let you know anything about the scoring until it’s broadcast) and we were bundled up and put into our car and shipped back to the restaurant.
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For doing Iron Chef America, we got paid $1000 and car service round trip to the restaurant and back. And for a year, that was it. It almost felt like it didn’t happen.
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For about a year, this picture was the

only proof I’d even been on the show.

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But a few months later, after the filming was done, the producers called me and asked if I’d be on The Next Iron Chef. Danielle and I were opposed but Jesus was all for it. “We can do this again. It’ll be awesome.” The next day he came into work and said, “We can’t do this. There’s no way.”
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And so it goes at Dirt Candy.
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To see who won, what the secret ingredient was, and whether Morimoto can still hold his head up high, tune in to Iron Chef America this Sunday, August 29 at 10pm (Americans only, however. Canada – you get the shaft, once again). And if you’re in NYC, come on down to our Iron Chef Viewing Party that night, starting at 9pm.

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1) Taping a TV show is very, very, very boring.

2) Television studios are freezing cold.

3) We didn’t stand a chance.

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It’s not that I’m being bashful here, but the show’s Iron Chefs have filmed in Kitchen Stadium dozens of times, they know the kitchen and they know what to expect. They’ve been on TV almost every day, and they know what the judges want and expect. As for us? We were flying blind. Working in a new kitchen is hard, working in a new kitchen while camera people ran around, a clock ticks down and the possibility of completely losing my dignity on television hang over my head like a 500 lb sword – that was going to be almost impossible.

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Jesus realizes that his previous optimism of five

minutes ago was completely unfounded and

there’s no way we can do this.

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I also realized that the battle is real. It’s one hour long and it is intense. Watching this episode being filmed hardened my resolve to go on the show and kick butt, but my mood was swinging like a San Francisco bachelor circa 1972. I’d wake up in the middle of the night panicking, and I considered backing out more than once, thinking that I’d made a huge mistake.

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Danielle is making a list.

She’s checking it twice.

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But the day finally came and Danielle, Jesus and I met up at Dirt Candy that morning. We packed basically the entire restaurant – everything we thought we might possibly need – into the car they sent for us, and headed over to the Food Network studios. When we arrived they took our clothes away from us and told us that the show before ours was running late and we weren’t allowed in the dressing room yet, so we sat around in the production offices for an hour, pretending to read cookbooks. Danielle was hungry so they sent us snack packs which she mostly couldn’t eat since she’s gluten-intolerant. Jesus was nervous and he opened every single item in the packs, poked at them but didn’t eat anything.

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They pulled us into the studio kitchen so we could check and make sure we had everything we needed. Even at this point things were still moving along at a leisurely pace and it was hard to imagine that soon we’d be hurtling down the roller coaster without brakes and with our engine on fire.

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Camera Ready Jesus.

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Then they whisked us into our dressing room where our chef clothes were waiting for us, starched, ironed and cleaner than I’ve ever seen them before. We were made pretty and camera-ready, make-up was applied, powder was puffed, and then we sat. And waited. And waited. And waited.

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Danielle in the production offices making

phone calls and giving a weak smile. Inside,

she is screaming.

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Finally, microphone packs were attached and, two and a half nerve-wracking, boring, exhausting hours after we arrived, we were led out into Kitchen Stadium.

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The strangest thing about being on Iron Chef is that it happened so long ago – I actually filmed my segment almost exactly a year ago today. About five months ago I just started assuming that my episode was so bad it would never air. But now it’s airing and the thing that’s going to be weirdest is the time warp of watching myself a year ago on TV. I’m a completely different chef now, and I can’t look back at the food I was making when Dirt Candy opened without a list in my head of all the things I’d do differently. The strongest urge I’m going to have while watching the episode is to yell at my past self, “You call that cooking? Come on, step up your game, Past Me!”

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Past Me practicing plating for Iron Chef.

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When I first got the call to be on Iron Chef America, Dirt Candy had been open for less than a year. I’d been cooking with electricity for almost six months, and had finally gotten the gas hooked up about three months before. I was in the middle of service and Michael Colameco was shooting a segment for his show in the dining room so we were in total chaos. The phone rang, and someone on the other end said, “Hi, we’re calling from the Food Network. Is Amanda there?” They told me they were the producers of Iron Chef America and they were inviting me to compete on an episode.

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“I don’t think so,” I said.

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They wanted to talk the next day, and I said “fine” but I was 100% determined not to be on their show. They were looking for chumps to throw into the shark tank with their big time Iron Chefs and I didn’t want to be savaged and mauled on national TV. But for the rest of service, my head was full of the possibilities. A million scenarios spun through my tiny mind but what they all boiled down to was the same thought that keeps people putting one more quarter in the slot machine, that gets people buying one more lotto ticket: what if I won?

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The next morning I told Danielle and Jesus that I was going to be talking to the Iron Chef people and there was a good chance I’d agree to be on the show because I couldn’t say no to a chance to get Dirt Candy in front of an audience this big. Also, what if I won? Then, like a cold-hearted boss, I told Danielle that there was a good chance I wouldn’t be taking her on the show. She’d only been out of cooking school for four months at that point, and if I actually went on the show I wanted a team with serious skills. To her credit, she told me she’d go along with whatever I decided. Jesus, exhibiting what would become his trademark attitude throughout the Iron Chef experience, was psyched. “We can do this. We’ll win. It’ll be easy.” Followed, half an hour later, by him taking me aside and telling me, “We can’t do this. It’s too much. We’re going to fail.”

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The phone call came and I told the producers I was on the fence but I really didn’t want to be humiliated. I’ve seen vegetarians on reality TV and they don’t do well: they’re usually made to look like kooks, then thrown off the show before the first commercial break. The producers told me that they wanted it to be a fair battle and started going over the rules. And somewhere in there I said yes. I figured that I’d be crazy not to do it and we seemed to have enough time to practice and get our act together before the taping.

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Practicing and getting our act together

before the taping.

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But, more importantly, I thought that if someone was going to be the first vegetarian chef on Iron Chef America, if someone was going to go out there representing vegetarian food, I’d rather it be me than anyone else. Part of that is, of course, my giant ego, but part of it is also the fact that vegetarian food has been chained to the animal rights movement and the health food movement for years, which has let the food mainstream dismiss it. There’s nothing wrong with animal rights or health food, but Dirt Candy is just about food, and it’s about vegetarian food as nothing more than cooking vegetables – no politics, no health claims or virtuous living, just giving vegetables a chance to be treated as seriously as chefs treat pork. It’s a point of view that isn’t seen very often, especially on the Food Network and I wanted my chance to put a different face on vegetarian food.
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This is the face I want

to put on vegetarian food. It is the

face of a girl who trying very hard not to

throw up from stress.

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The rule package arrived, which was about six inches thick, and we all signed off on the multiple copies of the contracts that essentially said we’d be killed in our sleep if we violated the rules or gave away any secrets. I was also thinking about who was going to go into Kitchen Stadium with me. I wanted to hire Glory, a fellow chef and friend, to be on my team – you’re allowed two people – but then I realized that Danielle had to come. Me, Danielle and Jesus are my kitchen, they’re my team, they’re who I work with every day. I didn’t want to hire a ringer and then have to come in the next day and work with Danielle who hadn’t been a part of this experience. What kind of fun would that be? Dirt Candy is the three of us, come hell or high water, and I was sticking with Jesus and Danielle no matter what. The three of us would win or lose together. Most likely lose.

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Dirt Candy on a Tuesday morning while

prepping for Iron Chef.

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The only way to deal with Iron Chef is to go big or go home. You either take it really seriously, or you shouldn’t do it at all. So I started closing the restaurant every Tuesday for four weeks so we could practice, knocking out menu after menu in 60 minutes. And doing this taught us lots of lessons:
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Lesson #1: I’m a mess. I cannot keep my station clean when I cook. I am the dirty little pig of chefs.

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How my station looked after a

Tuesday practice. Yes, I am scum.

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Lesson #2: Danielle cannot plate food on the fly. It leads to tragedy.

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Danielle’s plated dessert. This is

a national tragedy.

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Lesson #3: Jesus has a hard time remembering details. He’s the rock on this team, but every now and then he’d just space out and be on another planet.

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Jesus and I running drills. Right

this minute, Jesus has no idea who he is

or what he is doing.

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Every Tuesday when we practiced, anyone walking by and looking in the window would have thought we were insane. Dirt Candy was a battle ground. At first we thought we could wash the dishes ourselves while we cooked but we’re too small and we were using every pot and pan we had two or even three times each Tuesday. We brought in Antonio to do the dishes after the first Tuesday and he couldn’t even keep up. On Tuesdays, the restaurant became a tornado of food and by the time we were done the place was a wreck and the floor looked like a swamp.

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Tuesdays at Dirt Candy.

We will soon reduce these vegetables

to garbage and horror.

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Towards the end of our practice sessions, we had it down. We were knocking our menus out in under an hour, and we were tight.  I was feeling good. Jesus was panicking less. Danielle was getting way better. And then came the last day. We did a final practice, then we all went home. And I spent all night crying. Because the next day I was going to be the first vegetarian on Iron Chef America, representing vegetarian food, and I knew that somehow I was going to screw it all up.

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As it turned out, things were going to be much worse than I expected..

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Antonio contemplates just how

long he’s going to have to spend

cleaning up after us. He is appalled.

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I was told to show up for the taste test with an apron to have a quick picture taken and so of course, with perfect Dirt Candy timing, I had had a long, hot awful day. The night before my dishwasher had died during service (the machine, not the human being), and that morning when I came in to work Danielle informed me that my freezer upstairs had died in the night and that my downstairs freezer wasn’t sounding so good. So I spent all morning getting repair people in and bleeding money, then raced uptown to the TIME offices, stopping on the way to pick up two bags of carrots at D’Agostinos: one of organic carrots and one of non-organic carrots.

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If you get the magazine when it hits the stand and see the bigger photos, you can check out the crazy shoes I’m wearing  and the array of bizarre footwear on all the chefs testifies to the fact that none of us expected to have our feet photographed.

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As for the organic vs. non-organic debate, I want to say that I didn’t detect any difference in the taste. I believe in comparing things on a one-to-one basis and not stacking the deck. The organic carrots and non-organic carrots I bought were from the same produce section at D’Agostino, sitting right next to each other – they’d probably both been on the shelves for about a week. So of course they tasted the same. If I had bought one organic carrot from a farmer’s market and one non-organic carrot from the supermarket they would have tasted wildly different, but the taste has a lot more to do with where you’re getting your carrots rather than any essential magic in the souls of organic carrots. In fact, the non-organic carrots were slightly sweeter!

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A lot of the chefs brought in really particular products they wanted to compare, sourcing their eggs and meat from organic purveyors they knew and trusted, who turn out a superior product, and using those in this taste test. But I feel comfortable in saying that if you’re shopping for produce in the supermarket, there’s not going to be a huge amount of taste difference between organic and non-organic you take off the shelves. You might feel like one is healthier or safer than the other, but apart from the price-tag the difference, as far as I see it, is negligible.

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Monday: Bonus family meal! Normally we don’t do Mondays. Danielle’s gluten free pancakes, egg whites and corn and fruit salad.

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Tuesday: Jesus’ first family meal back. Salad with shredded carrots, fruit salad with mangoes, grapes and oranges and caramelized red onions with tofu (in the pitcher is salad dressing).

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Wednesday: rice noodles with tomato paste, feta and olives. Also, two kinds of tofu are in there, too.

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Thursday: rice noodles with mushrooms and smoked tofu, salad and caramel popcorn.

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Darka, one of our neighbors, brought us a box of figs from her cousin’s place.

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Friday: roasted figs, zucchini fritata and sliced oranges (made by our intern, Abbey).

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Hey look: bonus squash blossom picture!

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Saturday: rice noodles with zucchini, green beans and mushrooms all cooked up with butter. And a chickpea salad.

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The bummer about food on TV is that you can’t taste it. But I’m always trying to make your lives richer, deeper and more meaningful, and so after you watch Dirt Candy compete on Iron Chef America on Sunday, August 29th at 10pm you can come into the restaurant and taste the food I prepared for the judges!

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On Thursday, September 2 Dirt Candy will be hosting an Iron Chef America Dinner where I’ll recreate the five-course meal served to the judges. And frankly, I’m a better chef now than I was then and so what you taste is going to be even better than what they had.

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“Even better?!? Impossible!”

Even better!?.

The meal is five courses (including dessert, of course) and it’ll cost $50/person (alcohol, tax and tip not included). I’ll also be answering any questions about the Iron Chef experience (that I’m legally allowed to answer). So come on down, and eat like an Iron Chef judge with us on Thursday, September 2. To make a reservation, just call the restaurant (212-228-7732).

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