In the contest, chefs from 24 different countries race to prepare 12 portions of an elaborate meat and a fish dish in five and a half hours, each team working in tiny cubicles before a live, flag-waving audience. Each chef gets one apprentice, who must be 22 or younger. The winner is determined by the quality and presentation of the food.

This year's American team is led by Timothy Hollingsworth, the 28-year-old sous-chef at the French Laundry. He's been training up to 50 hours a week in a replica kitchen, with his own personal coach.

If you can work fast and get your recipe together, then you still have time to enter the Tillamook Cheese Macaroni & Cheese recipe contest!

The Oregon-based cheese company has teamed up with LA's McCormick & Schmick's to sponsor the contest. Entries have to be submitted by Tuesday, May 2, 2006. Hey! That's today! The winner of the contest, which will actually be held on May 25, 2006, will receive $1,000 and will go on to the next "round" in Portland, OR to vie for the $5,000 national grand champion prize.

So hurry! But remember, the "directions" on the back of the box don't count as a recipe.

[via: LAist]

For the third installment of their hit series, Top Chef, Bravo wanted to take the competition up a notch by bringing in some very discerning judges: a group of forty 10-year olds. The theme of the whole episode seemed to be to make unappealing food appealing, both visually and taste-wise, to a group of picky eaters, hence the name of the episode: Nasty Delights.

The quickfire challenge, which awards immunity from elimination, at the beginning of the show dealt with octopus. Given a whole octopus, the chefs had 60-minutes to make it look and taste good - a difficult feat on any day, but compounded by the fact that some people had never really dealt with the ingredient before.  Braising seemed to be the cooking method of choice and the guest judge, Laurent Manrique of San Francisco's Aqua restaurant, had a difficult time judging. In fact, there were four dishes that he liked, but Tiffani's traditionally prepared octopus dish, brimming with Mediterranean flavors, was what won her the challenge.

If you are anything like me, in addition to being a fan of Iron Chef America, you've wondered what it's like to actually be inside kitchen stadium during a culinary battle. Not as one of the chefs, of course, but simply as a spectator. Unfortunately, due to the confidentiality agreement that studio audiences must sign, it seems unlikely that many first hand accounts of what the live show is like are going to come our way. Fortunately, though, the Amateur Gourmet is a risk taker (who read the confidentially agreement carefully) and decided to reveal as much as he could about the taping without facing a $1,000,000 fine.

I had heard a rumor that Kitchen Stadium was on the West Coast, but it turns out that it is filmed in New York in the same studio where Emeril Live! and 30 Minute Meals are taped. Despite the fact that Adam couldn't say who participated in the battle he saw, we can safely assume that it was an episode scheduled for next season. He also seemed to share my suspicion that the secret ingredients are not very secret to the Iron Chefs, since not one of them looked surprised to hear what it was. But even with some of the magic missing, the Amateur Gourmet couldn't praise Alton Brown's performance as commentator highly enough and really enjoyed watching the top class iron chefs cook.