Trilogy Health Services

June Judges the 11th Culinary Olympics

March 18, 2019

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By June Rice

This blog post is written by our new resident blogger, June Rice. Click here to read her story.

Yesterday I experienced an entirely new activity for me. I was privileged to be one of four residents of The Springs at Stony Brook to help judge in the 11th Culinary Olympics which pitted 11 Chefs from the Trilogy Network of Senior Living facilities. About six professional chefs also judged, but we four residents produced the Residents’ Choice Award.

We had not had lunch, but each of us did have a glass of water. About twelve-thirty, two chefs showed up with the first entry. They had won the right to go first by drawing a knife out of a board that had a number “1” on it.

One of the chefs showed us how the dish would look on a plate if served to us. The other chef gave each of us a sample portion of the same entrée. We knew we would be sampling ten others, so we were careful to eat only a couple of bites. Each entry was a work of art as well as a culinary masterpiece, and we judged them on Taste, Appearance, and Creativity. We rated each attribute by giving points 0-5, with five being best. A perfect score was 15 points, but we could give half points.

We sat there from 12:00 to almost three o’ clock eating a couple of bites every ten minutes or so. The frustrating thing was that we often wanted to eat the whole thing, but didn’t want to get too full. Finally our chef, Jon, at number 10, served us a delicious meat loaf with some other accouterments and I ate the whole thing. My daughter Cathy, who came to capture the adventure in photographs, helped my fellow resident, Angelo, who can’t see well enough to write. She also was a willing volunteer to eat a succulent shrimp on top of one entry for me, as she knows I had as soon eat a grub worm as a shrimp!

Our Stony Brook chef’s entry was judged overall third (Bronze trophy) but he was only half a point below the first place winner.

I got the other results from Deanna Dome, but left them in her office. She promised to e-mail them to me, but they are lost in cyberspace.

Somehow, I was not a bit hungry for supper at 5:00, so I skipped supper and ate an apple and a glass of buttermilk about 7:00 p.m.

It’s amazing how tired sitting and eating for three hours is!

I enjoyed my foray into judging. I would not like to do it every day. I was surprised and pleased that the management presented me with a gift card to Meijer’s for ten dollars.

I hope Jon serves us that meat loaf recipe soon.

Printed with permission – copyright June Rice from column “Education and Common Sense”