No TV Cooking Competition Yet

When I met my boarding school roommate, Nancy in Charlotte for dinner Sunday she brought up a subject dear to my heart, cooking. Nancy was one of my early, non-family members I cooked for. At Walkers I was the only person who had an illegal toaster oven in my dorm that I made Boursin stuffed mushrooms in. Now there might have been other girls with toaster ovens, but no one else made anything with mushrooms.

Nancy said that when she watches the TV show, “The Next Food Network Star” she thinks of me. Her actual words to me were, “You could easily win that show.” Now I don’t think there is anything easy about any of those cooking competition shows, but they do seem like something I have been training for my whole life.

I have been cooking since age five when I would get up and make myself scrambled eggs while my parents slept late on weekends. I started cooking dinner for my family around third grade since my mom was very sick for a year. I started a catering business in college without any training and kept it going for ten years. That is the cooking side.

I love to entertain people and could talk about food, cooking and people’s connection to food all day long. I channeled my passion for eating into a zeal to make sure that no one goes hungry in Central and Eastern North Carolina through my volunteering at the food bank. I have lost and gained hundreds of pounds so I am good at cooking both fattening and healthy food. That’s the heart part of cooking shows.

Then I love games. I love to play games, I love to win at games and I love to be strategic in everything I do. Cooking competitions are not about who is the best cook since no one watching the show can taste what people make. Learning to satisfy the judges better than the person next to you, all the while making people like you is the crux of those shows. In the end the person who wins is the one people like the best. That’s the hardest part about it.

As much as trying out for one of those competitions is something I would love I have one bigger thing that holds me back. My family. Not that they are holding me back, they are supportive, but my real life job is to make sure that everything in our household is running, hopefully smoothly, but at least running. As long as Carter is still home and Russ is still traveling all over working I need to be here, at least for Shay Shay. So cooking competition will have to wait at least until Carter goes to college.

Nancy, thanks for the encouragement and lifelong support. Two more years of cooking everyday and writing about food can’t hurt my chances, not as much as trying now and not having my head in the game because I was worried about what was going on at home. That’s the strategic part of me talking. I need to clear the deck if I am going to try and win and you know I always play to win.