Culinary Combat

Our friend Mollie heard about this fun event called Culinary Combat and invited us to join her and Eric. We decided it wold be fun to keep it a secret from the Erics, so we bought tickets and planned it without telling them where they were going. They were very curious. The event was in Ocala (about 30 minutes away). When we were driving there, Mollie's tire blew out and by the time we got to the shoulder of the freeway, the tire tread was completely off the rim. It was crazy, but we made it safely to the side of the road and between the two guys they changed the tire very quickly. We arrived at the event, which was at the Ocala country club, and we told the boys what we were doing. Culinary Combat is a fundraiser for Children's Miracle Network that is similar to Iron Chef on the food network. They had three local chefs who were given a secret ingredient at the beginning of the evening and had 1 hour to create 3 dishes with the ingredient. When we arrived they were revealing the ingredient which was grouper. While the chefs were cooking, there were stations of food set up all around for us to enjoy, including wine and beer. They had video of the chefs cooking on closed circuit TV all around so we could watch them cook. After they were done, we watched the judges judge the dishes. They even auctioned off an extra plate of each of the creations. We had fun, though we were a little disappointed that we did not get to enjoy the culinary creations.