Item #154: Delicious

For those who like to look their food in the eye as they eat it, B–J’s Bedouin wedding feast (item #154) is a dream come true. In a glass dish, second-year Christine Buras has assembled a smattering of silver-dollar-sized lion fish, a row of butterfish, and one, long, winding, Barracuda—all with a putrid, grayish–brown hue, and all with distant expressions in their oven-baked eyes.

Buras’s idea was the result of a google search, which she says revealed a Bedouin fondness for mixing and matching animals. This also explains her second creation: a de-boned squab stuffed inside of a de-boned chicken, stuffed inside of a de-boned duck, all with the heads and feet lopped off and roasted. For good measure, Buras added in two pigs legs, which tasted, at least to this reporter, suspiciously like chicken. Because spices are an integral part of any Bedouin feast, and because duck heads alone would probably be unpalatable, the roast is complemented by sunny paris seasoning and Mediterranean sea salt.

In preparation for today’s judging, Buras put in a solid 12-hour shift, starting in the kitchen at 10 P.M. on Saturday and finishing up this morning. The ingredients, she says, were all purchased by a team member in Chinatown, and took up three-shelves of her refrigerator for a few long days before being cooked.