Competitive Cooking

I don’t really know of any types of human beings that are more competitive than high schoolers.

High school, basically, could best be described as Darwinism at it’s finest, a great big melting pot of cultural diversity, survival of the fittest, surviving mutations, and cystic acne. Give teenagers a school assignment, and the person who gets a perfect score will always get glares of resentment. Get a room full of teenagers talking about gnarliest stunt they ever did, and you won’t be blessed with silence until puberty is gone and done. To summarize, competitions in high school are ten times more fun thanks to the people competing in them, and when culinary kids get going with their knife skills and the sear on their venison and the tourne cut on their potato, get ready to see tears and sweat.

The ProStart Culinary Competition is coming up for year 2011, and after getting a good face full of the competition last year, I’m pretty eager for this year’s go around, if only to see grown men cry and my fellow peers cut and burn their way to eternal (high school long) glory. The team is made up of 5 exceptional students, people who got shanghaied into practicing three days out of a week perfecting a julienne they might not have to use. The students are all junior age or above, dedicated to culinary and trying to give themselves a jumpstart on college applications and their culinary careers by dolling up their high school transcripts with a victorious state competition. They’re not taken seriously in normal high school life, if I said their names in typical high school foot traffic not a particularly large demographic would know what or who I was talking about. And that’s the best part.

You’ll probably hear a lot of stuff about this competition from me coming up in the later days this year. Competition’s in spring, and that’s not a lot of time for me to lose my competitive spirit, so the novelty probably will not wear off. Smack talk, pictures, and newsflashes will abound, because seeing people competing at something that they all love and talk about all the time is really cool, and maybe I can get digitally sentimental enough to get you guys excited too.

Here’s the team members:

            Jordan Guevera

            Robby Tanner

            Kara Zopfi

            Sara Meador

            Becky Staring

Keep an ear out for their names.