Diary, July, 2001

Friday, July 6th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Tuna (IC), Fatty Tuna (SM)
Cooking Style: Italian vs. French, Japanese Style
Iron Chef: Masahiko Kobe Challenger: Shinya Tasaki: World's Number One Sommelier (Wine Taster)
One of the few amatuers to challenge an Iron Chef. Tasaki can Cook too, he beats Kobe!

Saturday, July 7th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Unisex (Young) Salmon
Cooking Style: Modern Japanese vs. Traditional
Iron Chef: Masaharu Morimoto vs. Shuichi Fuji
Rerun of June 15th

Friday, July 13th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Lobster
Cooking Style: Japanese vs. Californian
Iron Chef: Hiroyuki Sakai Challenger: Ron Siegel of San Francisco's Charles Nob Hill
Siegel's flashy, imaginative dishes surprise the judges. Veteran Kano Tenmei said he thought
the Japanese had the best taste buds. Siegel's offers tempt their tongues and he wins.

Saturday, July 14th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Spanish Mackerel
Cooking Style: Szechwan Chinese vs. Traditional Japanese
Iron Chef: Chen Kenichi Challenger: Mitsuo Harada
Chen remarked about never having worked with the ingredient before, then he lost.
It was starting to look like the month to show the Iron Chefs losing battles.

Sunday, July 15th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Giant Mushrooms
Cooking Style: Italian vs. French
Iron Chef: Masahiku Kobe Challenger: Shoji Yamaoka
Kobe comes up with a wonderful Mushroom Panini wrapped in newspaper and wins the battle.

Thursday, July 19th, 2001
I entered the Iron Chef Fan Forum and found a nice group of Iron Chef fans.
I told them about my Wooden Chef idea. They liked it and encouraged me to
go on with it. The Forum also suggested Wooden Chef theme ingredients:
Spam, Vienna sausages, fish sticks, and macaroni and cheese. They had a
bunch of recipe ideas of their own.

Friday, July 20th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Veal
Cooking Style: Chinese vs. French
Iron Chef: Chen Kenichi Challenger: Kyoko Kagata
Kagata, a woman who had beat Chen five years earlier, didn't win this time.
It was a tough one tonight. We substituted beef for veal. It turned out that Elaine picked the best cut,
two pieces sliced into quarter inch thick strips. That made it easier. I allowed one half pound for
Challenger and Iron Chef, then cut both pieces in half and cut one of the half again, using the quarter
pound for the two stuffed dishes and the smaller pieces for the other dishes. Stephanie missed the
cherries, mangoes, and bananas in the salt oven. Fortunately I had some Hungarian Cherries in a jar
and a banana, but I was out of mangos, so I put in a few canned peaches. I got off to a late start and
missed a lot while I was in the kitchen. The girls gave me a running commentary "Hey Papa, he put
pumpkin in the Italian stuff" I used some of the carrots Elaine cooked the other day to sub for the
pumpkin. All in all, not too bad. The Salt oven was the best. Since we had three girls and me tasting,
we only had about a quarter pound of beef apiece. The kitchen was hot and messed up as usual,
the girls stuffed their faces and went to bed, and another Wooden Chef night is OVAH!

Saturday, July 21st, 2001
Main Ingredient: Clams (Girl's Festival)
Cooking Style: Japanese
Iron Chef: Hiroyuki Sakai Challenger: Knodo Yukihito
Repeat of June 29th
I just ran out of truffles and had to substitute Pennsylvania Dutchman Mushrooms (R) (stems and pieces) instead.
First, I found out by trying to send recipes to Stephanie Masumura (www.ironchef.com) that by the time I put together the basic recipe, add in the rough sketches of the Iron Chef original dishes, and then put in the pictures of my version, the whole thing is too big to email. She suggested that I start a website and I have just found an ISP that looks good, so maybe soon I can put up the 800+ megabytes of stuff that I have built up since last March.
I read that the Official Iron Chef book only has about five recipes in it ???

Sunday, July 22nd, 2001
Main Ingredient: Foie Gras
Cooking Style: French
Iron Chef: Chen Kenichi Challenger: Dominique Corby
A famous battle that ended in a tie.

The Forum decided to use Spam instead of foie gras. I could imagine Chairman Angel in Hawaii wearing a bright floral shirt that rivals Chairman Kagas outfits. He also gave us four recipes, genuine Hawaiian cuisine. We had four Judges, Phil, Jean, Audrey, and "Truffles". They all liked The dishes, making comments like the judges on Iron Chef.

I must give credit where it is due. There is little imagination on my part. First of all, there are the great

Iron Chefs, I am just copying from them using cheaper ingredients. They are the brilliant masters of

culinary art, I am just a bumpkin form Cleveland where we think that corned beef, pierogies, and

sauerkraut are gourmet cuisine.

Second, there is Superfan Stephanie Masamura's website, www.ironchef.com , without which I wouldn't

have a clue what to cook until the battle begins. Without her reviews and descriptions, I would be lucky

to match just one dish during the battle. I forgot to quote her information on the veal battle, so this is my

way of apologizing. She is my mentor and has encouraged me to start a website so I can share the

hundreds of recipes that I have developed. Stephanie does all of this work without making any money

from it. She has no sponsors or pop-up advertising; this is a labor of love from Iron Chef's "Ichiban" Number

One Fan. FujiTV and Food TV have threatened legal action against her, but have wisely backed off. If they

were smart, they would put her on the payroll and make wise use of a tremendous asset. I believe that

ironchef.com created a big interest certainly on the West coast, back when Iron Chef ratings were in the

basement. I hope that you all visit her site and look at Battles by Theme to see where I get my recipe ideas.

To play Wooden Chef, I look up the main ingredient on Food TV, then look the theme ingredient on

Stephanie's site, then take the printout to the store and buy whatever ingredients I see I will need.

The battle will almost always use rice and I keep a lot of canned seafood on hand. Speaking of credit,

I am partial to Crown Prince(R) because they gave me a free cookbook.

Although Elaine has graciously helped me clean the kitchen, and the girls help a bit, the mess is usually

beyond human comprehension and damage control is mainly my responsibility.

The rule is: If You Burn It, You Scrub It Out".

through the Iron Chef Fan Forum, emailed me suggesting that I set up a website on Yahoo.
I looked into it and found that their service was much better than the others I had been looking at.

I signed up for service and then had to start figuring out how to set up the website.

Friday, July 27th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Natto (fermented soy beans)
Cooking Style: Modern Japanese vs. Traditional (Ohta) Japanese
Iron Chef: Masaharu Morimoto Challenger: Tatsutoshi Kumamoto of the Ohto Faction
Natto is fermented soy beans, slimy, gooey, stinky, and nasty. It's an acquired taste.
One of the judges said something like "on the scoring chart there's a column for originality"
Morimoto's originality gets him a victory.

Saturday, July 28th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Tuna (IC) Fatty Tuna (SM)
Cooking Style: Italian vs. French, Japanese Style
Iron Chef: Masahiko Kobe Challenger: Shinya Tasaki: World's Number One Sommelier (Wine Taster)
A repeat of Kobe's July 6th loss.

Sunday, July 29th, 2001
Main Ingredient: Asparagus
Cooking Style: Chinese vs. French
Iron Chef: Chen Kenichi Challenger: Dominique Corby
The tie breaker of the Foie Gras Battle, that also ends in a tie!
I had two different kinds of canned asparagus. I made some very bland asparagus soup,
followed by tasteless asparagus in Hollandaise sauce mix. The asparagus wrapped in bacon was
all right because the bacon was good. We mixed the soup and sauce dishes together and added
a lot of hot sauce to give it some taste.

DISCLAIMER: Iron Chef is the property of FujiTV and all opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of FujiTV. The author is in no way affiliated with FujiTV or Food Network. The recipes presented here are loosely based on the dishes appearing on "Iron Chef", but are in no way supposed to be accurate copies. Use of copyrighted images is covered under the fair use section of the Copyright Law. This site is not responsible for the content of any other site to which it is linked. All text and graphics are ©Copyright 2001 by Brett Pijan, unless otherwise noted.