by Liz and Krista

(This Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich, bought by the sponsor, GoldenPalace.com will be on display. Jealous?)

We are going at it again and meeting up to watch some of the world's top-ranked competitive eaters attack a pile of grilled cheese sandwiches for a new title and possibly a new world record. The contest takes place this Wednesday, February 1st at the Planet Hollywood in New York and we're lucky enough to have work schedules that are flexible for important life events like this. Although, as Krista found out, mentioning to your boss the reason one actually needs to take off half of the day is to view a competitive eating contest in Time Square might not be a good idea. Note to self: remember less is more.

The Players

Here is a partial list, as supplied on the IFOCE website, of eaters who will be competing for the world title. These are all competitors who won qualifying rounds all around the country in order to participate in this all-star contest:

Sonya "Black Widow" Thomas
Joey "Jaws" Chestnut
Cookie Jarvis
Tim "Eater X" Janus
Bob "Humble Bob" Shoudt
Hall Hunt
Ron Koch
Richard "The Locust" LeFevre
Patrick Bertoletti
Eric "Badlands" Booker
Crazy Legs Conti
Leland Collins
Walter Hamilton

We were lucky enough to meet a lot of these eaters at the meatball competition, so we're hoping the camaraderie we sparked there will extend into this and future competitions. Or, at least, we are hoping certain comments in our previous article didn't damage the tenuous relationship we forged at the Tropicana. Or worst of all did we even forge a relationship? Are we considered just a flash in the pan of the serious competitive eating devotees?

Odds

Sonya won the 2005 world competition last year, eating 25 sandwiches in 10 minutes. However, this number was soon surpassed by others as they qualified for this year's competition. It seems a lot of records are being smashed this year. Is it something in the air? Has global warming affected the competitive nature of these eaters?

In August, Eater X ate 31 grilled cheese sandwiches, setting a world record and starting a ripple through the competitive eating community that Sonya would have a run for her money.

Then, during the October qualifier, Joey Chestnut broke Eater X's record by one and a half sandwiches, setting the current bar at 32.5 sandwiches in 10 minutes.

If there's anything to be learned by this sport, it is never to underestimate the new blood. You never know when an ingénue or a secretly-training pro is going to pop out of the woodworks and out eat the current best. Isn't that what keeps us on the edge of our seats? Another one we'll be keeping our eyes on is Pat Bertoletti, who was a huge upset at the corned beef competition earlier in the month, beating out both Sonya and Joey Chestnut by eating 11 sandwiches to their 10 3/4 (they went into overtime to determine 2nd place, which went to Chestnut by an eighth of an ounce!). He's young (20-years-old), and a serious contender. Could he be the new darling of the IFOCE? How long will it be until Sonya is usurped as the reigning champion? Is there a shelf life for a competitive eater? These are some of the questions we will be asking of as we talk to the competitors this Wednesday.

Burning Cheese Questions

We also want to hear from you, dear readers. We want to know what questions you would like us to pose to these eaters as they set out to consume the greasy cheese filled goodness. What are you dying to know? What hard-nosed questions should we be getting to the bottom of?

Here's an excellent article about Paula Wolfert's recently re-released cookbook The Cooking of Southwest France, or, as the author calls it, Extreme Cooking.

I've long known that Wolfert is considered the expert in authentic Mediterranean cooking. Most people know her best for her work on the cooking of provincial France, but her definition of Mediterranean extends to all countries that surround it, so you'll find recipes from Crete and Morocco, from Cypress and Turkey, as well as the expected Spain, France, and Italy.

The author explains that "not everyone is temperamentally suited to cutting up wild rabbits and draining their blood for use in sauces, or surfing the Internet and forking over big dough for fresh Boletus edulis (porcini or cèpes). Extreme cooking, like whitewater kayaking and out-of-bounds snowboarding, is only for a small segment of the population."

Still, there are people who love nothing better than rising to a suitable challenge, and Wolfert has her devotees. Before the re-release of this book, foodies hoarded their copies greedily: "Food people would lend their copies of James Beard or Julia Child, but they kept this book in locked drawers or hidden under pillows. One friend even kept hers with the unpublished manuscript of her first novel — in the freezer in case the house burned down."

The author describes the trials required to complete some of Wolfert's recipes:

"Prunes that have soaked in Armagnac for six months, minimum. The blood of a freshly killed hare. Nine pounds of fresh fava beans, husked and peeled. A 6-inch-thick bed of pine needles. One dish alone — a cassoulet — required trips to two gourmet shops, three butchers, a farmers market and a produce wholesaler. It put 72.5 miles on my car and cost $91.13."

Since the book was first printed, a lot has changed in America. You can now buy, and assume people know what you mean by, truffles, duck confit, fresh fava beans, pyrneean cheeses, and much more. Gone are the days when your only chance at actually cooking these recipes was if "your best friend spent her summers on a farm in Dordogne shacked up with a customs official."

I don't think that even I am quite extreme enough for Paula Wolfert, but I'm awfully glad she's out there. And if I need something to transport me away from yet another rainy Portland night, I just might pick up this book.

Mmm, I love Eggs Florentine. There is just something very lovely about the meeting of spinach and hollandaise sauce, warm yolk on crisp English muffins. It is definitely one of my favorite things to order when I'm out to brunch, since it falls distinctly in that category of "things I don't make for myself."

But...I'm always up for a food challenge! This is automatically a difficult one since it involves fancy things like poached eggs and a sauce that is notoriously difficult to master. But my friend Tom got us this rad egg poaching pan for a wedding present, and I've been dying to try it out. It has four little cups for eggs and works like a double boiler. Fun!

I decided if there was anyone who had a simplified, hard-to-fuck-up hollandaise sauce recipe, it would be Alton Brown. And ta-da! I printed it out and set to work. I was most nervous about the sauce and eggs, so I got the spinach cooking first. I chopped up a bunch of fresh spinach,

and sauteed this in olive oil with some chopped up onion and sea salt. I also got some potatoes going, because what's brunch without potatoes? I cooked them a bit in the microwave to soften them, then tossed them in a frying pan with onions, butter, and seasonings.

Finally, I got to work on the sauce. Here is Alton's recipe, which I cut in half, since there were only two of us eating these eggs:

3 egg yolks
1 teapsoon water
1/4 teaspoon sugar
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Pour 1-inch of water into a large saucepan; over medium heat, bring to a simmer. Once simmering, reduce the heat to low.

Place egg yolks and 1 teaspoon water in a medium mixing bowl and whisk until mixture lightens in color, approximately 1 to 2 minutes. Add the sugar and whisk for another 30 seconds.

Place the mixture over the simmering water and whisk constantly for 3 to 5 minutes, or until there is a clear line that is drawn in the mixture when you pull your whisk through, or the mixture coats the back of a spoon.

Remove the bowl from over the pan and gradually add the butter, 1 piece at a time, and whisk until all of the butter is incorporated. Place the bowl back over the simmering water occasionally so that it will be warm enough the melt the butter. Add the salt, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper. Serve immediately or hold in a thermos to keep warm.

You see that "serve immediately" phrase? Yeah, that came back to bite me in the ass. But at first, everything was easy peasy. I used a double boiler that I got from Willow as part of a Chocolate Factory she gave us for Christmas one year.

Eggs: good.

Butter: good.

Whisking: good!

Everything was coming together in a very hollandaisey way. I whisked the last of the butter in there and it was looking positively professional. But by this time, I realized I should have put the eggs up already. Oops. Got them started.

The little pan worked great. Oops, I forgot to start the English muffins. And the spinach and potatoes needed reheating. Shitballs. Okay, I'm in control.

After "put in a thermos," something I did not do, Alton didn't offer any other ways to maintain the hollandaise for several minutes while your eggs poach and your muffins toast. I kept it over the warm water and whisked it every once in awhile. Somewhere around realizing the eggs were poached and the English muffins were almost burning, the sauce just gave up on me. I tried all the culinary CPR I knew, but even I could tell the efforts were going nowhere fast. In the time period of approximately five minutes, my beautiful golden sauce went from a creamy liquid to this:

I know, disgusting. Even though I knew this was a tricky food and it was my very first attempt ever at making it, I felt like a fat loser for screwing it up. Especially since I had it at one point! Remember that? Anyway, the eggs were a little too done, making the moisture factor pretty low overall for the dish, but the end result was pretty tasty anyway.