ChapterOne
Marcia Hope Venerable
Fremont Street in Las Vegas was home to KISS impersonators, showgirls, The Golden Nugget Casino, and vacationers of every stripe ready to try their luck at slots or the blackjack tables.
But this week, it was home to The World’s Best Dishes Food Competition as well.
And Marcia Hope Venerable was in the middle of the chaos.
Hope, as her friends called her, had no interest in blackjack tables.
The table she was focusing on was the judges’ table.
Incredibly, she was in the finals for the title of World’s Best Recipe and for prize money in an amount she didn’t even want to consider.
It had been a long road to get here, to be in this spot, and have a chance to win. She still couldn’t believe it.
This was her second time in this competition, and she knew one wrong move, and she could easily blow it.
It was a bit weird to be in middle of the entertainment capital of the world, and have no interest in shows or gambling or any of it.
Though maybe she'd go see Donny Osmond once she was eliminated, like the last time she was here. Donny was a childhood crush. That smile! Those purple socks! It would be a good consolation prize to herself.
But she wasn’t eliminated.
Hope’s dish kept moving through the rounds and up the competition’s leader board. Other competitors were falling all around her like so much chocolate souffle, yet she remained.
Maybe, just maybe she could win! But a lot had to go her way before that happened.
Focus. Hope needed to focus if she wanted to keep her dreams alive.
She didn’t want to come this far in the competition to, well, only to come this far.
She didn’t want to repeat her mistakes from the last time she was here. She’d failed here before, spectacularly.
Two years ago, she’d qualified for The World’s Best Dishes Food Competition with her Anna Maria Dream Dessert. It was a family favorite treat for her girls when they went on vacation. She’d entered it into the local qualifying event, and it was a hit with judges too. The sweet, fluffy concoction helped her earn her first trip to Vegas.
She was a rookie food competitor back then. It was a great dish but not a great competition entry. She’d learned those were two separate things.
The dessert required several chilled layers of pudding and creams, and in the heat of Las Vegas, her fluffy dessert had turned into a mushy, soupy mess topped with crushed Oreos.
Yeah, not her best work.
She was as crushed as those Oreos when she’d failed so spectacularly. She thought cooking competitions were her thing, that she’d found her niche, but two years ago it had all gone totally wrong. She could still see the pudding sliding around in the thirteen by nine glass pan. She remembered her ugly attempts to spread Cool Whip over the mess. What an embarrassment!
She only hoped no one saw her disastrous dish. There was no thought of winning, just getting out without anyone noticing her, that was the goal.
This was the one food competition where home cooks and line cooks, and caterers went head-to-head with chefs, bakers, and pit masters. The food was the thing. Not the resume. This was what appealed to her. She didn’t have credentials from any culinary institute. But that didn’t matter if she made a delicious dish.
A middle aged empty nest mother of two, wife of one, small time caterer, was no match on paper for the chefs in the competition, some of whom ran restaurants in the luxury hotels a few miles away on the strip. Yet here she was, again.
After that defeat the first year, she’d wanted to quit. She felt like an imposter. She wasn’t good enough.
But something kept her going. She’d quit on herself so many times before in favor of her husband or her children. That was as it should be, she thought. Putting her dreams ahead of them was selfish.
But now that her children were adults, something had shifted. If she quit; it wasn’t selflessness. It was fear. And she feared her husband would never be grown. Using her kids as a reason not to pursue her dreams seemed like a cop out.
Hope told herself that she’d started this to prove something to her girls. They were grown now but she still wanted them to be proud of her. That used to be what she told herself.
