The Ann Arbor 500

I dreamed that three guys from my ward (John McElderry, Adam Frischknecht, and Dan Magleby) and I entered a cooking competition called "The Ann Arbor 500." The objective of the competition was to prepare a dish that had exactly 500 ingredients, and the rules stated that teammates had to take turns selecting one ingredient at a time and that each new ingredient had to blend harmoniously with the previous ingredient. Hundreds of teams had entered the competition and the opening ceremonies took place on the Diag on the U of M campus, which was filled with tents and balloons and news cameras. They fired off the starting pistol and John quickly picked his first ingredient, green peppers, and threw it in a pot. Adam picked next: yellow peppers. Those two ingredients seemed straightforward enough, but with the fourth ingredient Dan threw me a curveball: a live octopus.

After the live octopus (which Dan specified had to remain alive in the final dish), I wasn't sure what ingredient I could pick that would be complementary. I stood there for hours trying to think of something while John, Adam, and Dan put pressure on me because we were falling behind the other teams, some of which had already added 30 or 40 out of the 500 ingredients. Eventually I folded under the pressure and grabbed the pot full of peppers and a live octopus and headed back to my apartment where I could ponder my ingredient options. I spent the next week trying to decide between minced garlic (the easy way out) or crumbled up Ritz crackers (a bold move - breading a live octopus). At the end of the week I turned on the TV and they were showing an update of the Ann Arbor 500. The final round was underway and I realized that while my team was still stuck at just three ingredients, most of the other teams were up to 300 or 400 ingredients. So I grabbed the pot, threw in some garlic and frantically ran back to the competition.

The final round of the competition was being held at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was there to perform at the closing ceremonies. I found the rest of my team waiting for me in an aisle down on the main floor. To make up for the week of lost time, we were recklessly throwing ingredients into the pot and within a few minutes we had over two hundred ingredients. Overhead was a jumbotron showing the leading teams in a four-way splitscreen with a running point tally, and over the loudspeaker we heard an Alton Brown-like play-by-play announcer. Suddenly, even though we were so far behind every other team, they showed us on the jumbotron because we were chucking ingredients around with such furious speed.

The crowd really started to get behind our team because we were the underdogs and a few minutes later my sister Julie came down the aisle to talk to me. She said that she had joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and that she had convinced the choir to come down and support us. Suddenly the whole Motab surrounded us and started singing "Come Thou Fount of Ev'ry Blessing" to cheer us on. The spontaneous performance distracted our competitors, and the running tallies of all the other teams up on the jumbotron all came to a halt at 499 ingredients except for our team's tally, which furiously skyrocketed until we hit 500 right at the final cadence of "Come Thou Fount." Confetti rained down from above and the crowd erupted.

I was under the impression that a panel of judges would evaluate all of the completed 500-ingredient dishes and pronounce a winner, and I was worried that our live octopus stew wouldn't stand much of a chance. However, it turned out that the competition was merely a race to throw together 500 ingredients as quickly as possible, so my team ended up winning first place (afterwards we set the still-living octopus free).