Some secret ingredient.
You may have heard that there’s going to be a celebrity chef gala at this year’s Arts in the Inns festival in Kennebunkport on June 6. This new event pits a Maine homeboy with a chef “from away” in an Iron Chef-style competition where they are given a secret ingredient they have to use to whip up something marvelous. Well, actually, the chefs have already been told what their secret ingredient is going to be. It gets worse: The secret ingredient is lobster. Please, no angry phone calls or e-mails from folks in the lobster industry. I love a good lobster as much as the next gal. but isn’t it a little, um, obvious Call me crazy, but I was hoping for a true Iron Chef moment. You know, like the time the TV chefs were told they had to whip up a multi-course meal with milk as the featured ingredient. Now there’s a challenge.
“It’s a culinary challenge, but we’re giving them time to think about it because they don’t have great resources on the site,” said Rob Blood, spokesman for the festival, which runs June 3-7. “They’re going to be cooking on two Wolf grills and using the test kitchen, so they need to do a little prep work before that, before they can turn out something that’s going to be worth $185.”