Photos By: Brandon Neer

Francis Howell North’s fourth Iron Chef competition was held on Nov. 15 at Francis Howell High School. North’s team took first place for the first time this year. Howell and Central came in a close second and third, respectively.

“We got first place in both categories this year,” senior Chris Gegg said. “And we were the first school to ever do that.”

Chris was team captain this year, so he made all of the big calls, like how the meal would relate to this year’s theme of “Olympics.”

“Since the 2012 Olympics are going to be held in England, we wanted to do a kind of English-Greek twist on our meal,” Gegg said.

The team prepared a Greek spice encrusted talpia with bell peppers, taziki sauce and a Greek side salad with sweet potato crispies. The meal was served to the ten judges as well as over 30 audience members. So, that is 50 fish filets in under three hours.

“We cooked in the Cafeteria, and people would come through and watch us cook for a little bit, then walk out,” Gegg said. “I had two burners going in the kitchen and I blew a fuse so it took time to fix, and that was time lost.”

The team left at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday and started cooking at 2:30 in the FHHS kitchen. The stop time was 5:00 with only an hour to set up for the judges.

“We pretty much figured we had presentation, it was pretty elaborate,” Jasmine Crawford, another senior on the team,  said. “We had it completely perfect like 3 practices ago.”

“It all went well, we weren’t really stressed out, everything turned out perfect,” Crawford said.

And it did, the team was grateful and excited to win first place. Especially since they were also the first team to ever top both categories.

“It was a reward of their efforts,” Becky Just, FHN’s Foods teacher and Iron Chef coach, said. “They deserved to win, they just had a really great attitude about the whole thing.”