Let me start this post off by saying... I have never watched a single episode of Iron Chef and have no idea what it is about. However, if you're looking for a fun combined youth cookoff activity, this is it, and Iron Chef Competition is what we will be calling it!
The Young Men were in charge of the activity last year, so we recreated it the best we could. (Don't tell them, but ours was definitely better!)
Beforehand, we decided what ingredients we would provide beforehand. They were totally random (and frankly, cheap!) but that was on purpose to make things interesting. Our leader would add in a mystery ingredient (so that we didn't have a full advantage) and it turned out to be cream cheese.
Next, we knew that we wanted the missionaries to be the judges! We did some date-switching with the people who had them so we could have them for dinner that night (I'm sure they were so...excited...) and have them be judges. Boom! Killing two birds with one stone! Aww yeah! Wait... now it sounds like the two birds are the two elders... that's really sad.. I just meant that expression... yeah. Okay. I am going to stop typing...
Next, we bought the food items and an assortment of fun-size candies for the winners. Gotta have motivation!
I designed some flyers and made some group chats for the teams, and we collaborated on what to bring, etc.
A leader had two campfire stoves, so we arranged them outside.
We put together some cool bags with the food items, and gave each team a long ward-party table.
The teams had around 45 minutes to cook... and at 8 p.m., the missionaries ate.
I created a large flyer to accompany the event and this is what it looked like:
Obviously, this isn't exactly identical to the one I made because a) I doubted people would want their names and numbers online, so I put on random ones b) we do not have that many youth where I live (a girl can dream...) and c) my name, unfortunately, is not Rachelle Rodriguez. But overall, I thought it turned out super cute. I haven't figured out a way for me to make it editable, so if you want, comment and give me the information you want put in it and I will happily modify it for you free of charge. Or I can send you a file with blank space where the names and numbers go so you can do it yourself!
Honestly, the activity went better than I thought it would. Our team ended up winning, for one, but the missionaries actually liked both teams' dishes so much that we saw them continue to eat them after they told us the results!
One concern, however, was the team sizes. I know from personal experience that in huge teams, it can be kind of hard to get heard. Nothing went wrong with my team, but on another youth's they reported asking to help but not being given anything to do/included. Obviously, this was a specific problem based on specific youth, but I recommend for your activity, you make smaller groups. Maybe 5 per group? We hadn't been anticipating so many people to actually show up, so that was where the problem was. It didn't ruin the activity, I just learned something to incorporate when we do it next year.
If you have gotten tired of me rambling on this whole article, I made a quick infographic summing everything up.
You can contact me with any questions. Good luck!
