If you're in the Bay Area and you make a mean kimchi (or you just want to eat a bunch), take note: The inaugural Critter Kimchi Contest, sponsored by the Critter Salon, goes down Saturday, May 9, at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco. Competitors, bring your best quart of kimchi by 1 p.m.; tasters, stop by at 2 p.m. to sample and vote. $100 goes to the winner, $75 for second prize, and $50 for third....
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Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market held their very first Scrapplefest last month to celebrate the Pennsylvania treat, and the big draw was of course a cooking contest with the winner to be crowned Scrapple King. Third place went to a pulled-pork and scrapple sandwich with pecorino cheese, and second to crisp-fried scrapple used as toast points with seared tuna, mango and avocado. You'd think the big prize would've gone to the guys who made a sweet scrapple bread pudding, dressed with a white chocolate sauce, or maybe the creator of "Scrapple Nouveau", who made a napoleon of sorts by layering "his homemade scrapple with apricot compote, blood orange sauce, goat cheese, microgreens and a polenta-pig topping." But no, 2007's Scrapple King...
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The Chicago Tribune's Robin Mather Jenkins, on what it's like in the world of competitive cooking: People who enter cooking contests form an unusual subculture of the food world. They follow a different calendar than the rest of us: At the end of December, when we're getting ready to celebrate New Year's Eve, they anxiously anticipate the announcement of the finalists for the National Chicken Cooking Contest. At the end of September, when most of us are watching college football, they're holding their breath for a phone call from Pillsbury to say that they're going to "the big one": the biennial Bake-Off.They even have their own language. They call themselves "contesters," not contestants, and their activity is "contesting." The recipes...
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