Photographed By Steve Buchanan
What is it that motivates people to enter cooking contests? Bragging rights? Cash prizes? The competitive rush? Contestants range from hardcore veteran competitors who travel the country entering cook-offs for big cash prizes to neophyte home cooks willing to take a chance with Grandma’s recipe for apple pie.
Annapolis resident Liz Barclay spends much of her spare time perfecting recipes for cooking contests. “I remember in one cook-off a contestant complained about her blue cheese because it was moldy,” laughs Barclay. Her competitive nature spurs her on: The contests, she says, are akin to competing in sports. “Cooking gives me the same thrill,” she says. “You are elbow to elbow with others who are after the same thing that you are. But for me, it’s more about the experience than winning.”
In high-profile contests, competitors must sign affidavits confirming that their recipes haven’t been plagiarized. Contestants are escorted to their cooking stations where they are closely observed. In local .cook-offs, the pressure is significantly less intense. These contests attract entrants who prefer a more low-key, laid-back challenge, where the ultimate prize is bragging rights at the next PTA meeting.
We’ve asked winners of both types of competitions to share their prize-winning recipes. Although you won’t be able to enter these concoctions in other cooking contests, they’re sure to be winners at your own dinner table.
Marnita Thorpe
Ninth Annual Sweet Potato Pie Contest
2003 Maryland State Fair
Timonium, Md.
Marnita Thorpe is a huge fan of the under-appreciated sweet potato. She has a ready list of reasons why it should be a regular part of the diet, not just an ingredient in her prize-winning pie. Marnita will tell you sweet potatoes are virtually fat-free, very low in sodium, and that one cup of cooked sweet potatoes provides as much beta carotene (vitamin A) as a whopping twenty-three cups of broccoli. She inherited an appreciation for the bright orange tuber from her mother, Eldorado, a native of North Carolina, a.k.a. “The Sweet Potato Capital of the World.” Thorpe, a Baltimore-based promoter of gospel music nationwide, followed the same recipe she used in the 2002 Maryland State Fair competition. But she won in 2003. “It takes persistence and determination to be a winner,” she says. Her prize was an all-expenses-paid weekend for two in Philadelphia.
Eldorado’s Sweet Potato Pie
Liz Barclay
2003 National Chicken Cook-Off
Maryland Winner
Baltimore, Md.
Some women play golf as a hobby, others garden. Liz Barclay enters cook-offs. For the past sixteen years, Barclay, an administrator at Annapolis’s Indian Creek School, has entered more than a hundred cooking contests and won sixty, receiving as much .as $5,000 for winning the 2003 Bush’s Beans Chili Contest. She’s had the honor of meeting Julia Child at the 1979 National Beef Cook-off in Arizona. “I read cookbooks like novels. I read menus with care,” she says. “It’s like a black dress is just a black dress until you accessorize it with the right jewelry, you come up with something interesting and different. The same goes for food.”
Maple-Pecan Encrusted Chicken with Nectarine Brandy Sauce
Charles McKnew
2003 Crab Soup Contest
Cream of Crab Soup Category
Maryland Seafood Festival
Annapolis
Charles McKnew, executive chef at the Annapolis Radisson Hotel’s Regatta Grill and Bar, has won first place in the cream of crab category at the Maryland Seafood Festival’s Crab Soup Contest for the past three years. Adhering to the principle, “If it’s not broke, why fix it?” he brings back the same recipe each year. McKnew treasures the medal he won this past year, awarded by Gov. Robert Ehrlich. Since most of the thirty entrants were professional cooks from Maryland hotels and restaurants, the competition was serious. “Most of us know each other professionally and enjoy the contest because it gets us out of the kitchen,” says McKnew. “It’s a lot of fun.”
Chef McKnew’s Cream of Crab Soup
Dorrie Mednick
2003 National Oyster Cook-Off Main Course Category
St. Mary’s City, Md.
Dorrie Mednick spends a lot of time in her kitchen. “Cooking is my Valium,” says the Towson, Md., resident. Out of more than one hundred entries, from as far away as Oregon and California, Mednick won the $500 first prize in the National Oyster Cook-Off for her polenta and oyster recipe. “I wrote the recipe first and submitted it without actually trying it out,” she confesses. “When I found out that I won, I immediately went to test it. I tried it out on the chef at my retirement community. He said he it was so good that he was going to put it on the menu!”
Oyster Galettes with Polenta
Cortnee Stevens
Gold Medal Flour Kids’ Cookie Contest
2003 Maryland State Fair
Timonium, Md.
For twelve-year-old Cortnee Stevens, winning first place in the kids’ cookie contest at the 2003 Maryland State Fair was a big thrill. The idea behind the contest was to create a cookie based on a favorite book. “My little sister Allee likes to watch the Snow White movie, and I watch it with her. And I know there’s an apple in the story so I thought, ‘Apples and oatmeal, that sounds really good!’” Her mother, Sharon Stevens, says Cortnee and her younger sister love to help with the family’s holiday baking, but they never dreamed she would walk away a winner in her first cooking contest—and the $150 prize. What will she do with the prize money? “Put some in the bank and spend the rest on clothes,” says the seventh grader. How does she feel about her brief moment in the spotlight? “I liked it a lot,” she says with a grin. “I’m hoping to do the cookie contest again!”
Snow White Sleepy Apple Oatmeal Cookies
Sidney and Jim Trond
2002 & 2003 Pumpkin Pie Contest
Fall Into St. Michaels Festival
St. Michaels, Md.
Sidney and Jim Trond, owners of Gourmet by the Bay in St. Michaels, won the blue ribbon—and a bag of jellybeans—for the second consecutive year in the pumpkin pie contest at the Fall Into St. Michaels Festival. Sidney, an alumnae of the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan, based .the ingredients for the prize-winning pie on her grandmother’s recipe, substituting maple sugar for white sugar and adding a meringue topping. Says Jim, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, “We sell the pies in the store, and during the fall…we have them every other day. There are none left by the end of the day.”
Phyllis Hurley
American Chestnut Land Trust 2003 Chili Cook-Off
Port Republic, Md.
Port Republic’s Phyllis Hurley has enjoyed cooking for her family for decades but had never entered a contest before. When her daughter’s organization staged a fundraising chili cook-off last fall (actually, the eighth annual), she urged her mother to enter her vegetarian chili. It was more than twenty-five years ago when she created the winning recipe. “I realized that my youngest son was picking out the meat from everything, so a friend suggested I substitute other good things.” She has always served her regular chili over rice, so she just incorporated it into the recipe. “I love to cook, but I was surprised to win. To me it’s just a normal recipe, tasty, but pretty regular.”
Famous Chunky Vegetarian Chili
The Porkitects
2003 2nd Annual Bel Air BBQ Bash
Bel Air, Md.
A group of six barbecue-lovers, almost all architects, walked off with the top prize at the 2003 Bel Air BBQ Bash. “I went to Memphis, where they have great barbecue, and came back realizing that the only way you can get good barbecue around here is to cook it yourself,” says Brad Hammond, who helped start the Porkitects in 1994. According to Hammond, the secret is to cook the meat “low and slow,” which is barbecue-speak for low heat and a slow cooking time. This foolproof method has led The Porkitects to three grand championships and many first-place finishes, which even Hammond has trouble counting. His advice to barbecue beginners? “Get rid of the gas grill-it’s evil. And use wood chips-hickory for meat, apple for chicken and seafood, and pecan for just about anything.”
The Porkitects Barbecue Sauce
Jeffrey Slack
2003 Maryland Seafood Festival
Maryland Vegetable Crab Soup Category
Annapolis
Jeff Slack, banquet sous-chef at the BWI Marriott Hotel, won first place in the Maryland vegetable crab soup category, earning him a plaque and a metal. (Coincidentally, Slack used to work for Chef Charles McKnew, who won first place in the cream of crab soup category.) Slack suggests throwing a crab feast in advance of preparation and using the leftover shells to make the crab stock. “Be sure to rinse the shells off before you put them in the pot-this gets rid of excess Old Bay.”
Malcolm Brookover
2003 Crab Cook-off
Crab Cake Category
National Hard Crab Derby
Crisfield, Md.
Malcolm Brookover, a semi-retired hand engraver and Crisfield resident, took first place in the crab cake category at Crisfield’s 2003 National Hard Crab Derby with an original recipe he created for the occasion. This was Brookover’s second attempt at the coveted prize; he came in second in 2001. He says that this year’s victory was doubly sweet because he beat a roster of mostly women competitors. “They were all glaring at me when the announcement came,” he says with a chuckle. Brookover likes to experiment in the kitchen (he does all the cooking at home) and tried using dehydrated Idaho potatoes in the filler and toasted almonds as a “frosting” for the crab cakes. The formula pleased the judges, who awarded him a blue ribbon, an engraved pewter plate, a crisp $50 bill-and impressive bragging rights.
Baked Crab Cakes with Toasted Almonds
Nellie Flowers
2003 National Outdoor Show
Muskrat Cook-off
Cambridge, Md.
The Muskrat Cook-off has long had a starring role at the National Outdoor Show, a Dorchester County tradition celebrating its outdoor heritage. Nellie Flowers, a seventy-five-year-old Cambridge native is known locally as the queen of this event. “My grandma fixed muskrat with the head and teeth still on the animal, but I don’t do that,” she says. While Flowers doesn’t follow an exact recipe, she says the following instructions should be a close approximation.
