Hope
The day of the main competition had arrived. And Hope was ready.
She’d practiced over and over. One thing she knew from her cooking competition experiences was that something different went wrong every time. Nothing went according to plan, ever.
Winners adapted. They modified. They handled problems with ovens, or desert heat changing the temperature of the ingredients, or the portable refrigerators that, no matter what the setting, nearly froze things that were supposed to just be chilled.
It was all fair game. You had to pivot and adjust constantly.
Competitors had one hour to create their dishes and present them to the judges’ table.
The first few minutes of the hour went well. Hope turned on her oven to preheat and began to lay out her ingredients.
She would follow the steps she’d practiced over and over. Her recipe was more than ingredients and temperatures and presentation. Each dish she prepared was a choreographed dance. Hope moved through her cooking space with ease. And she gained energy from the spectators watching her do her thing.
But something told her to interrupt her normal steps, to check the oven early on. Sixth sense? Experience? Maybe even a healthy smidge of paranoia.
The oven wasn’t right. It wasn’t getting hot enough, fast enough. Marcia used her own thermometer to check. While the oven temperature dial read three-fifty, her thermometer told her differently. The oven was barely three-twenty. A less experienced competitor would assume because the dial said three-fifty, the oven was three-fifty. But it wasn’t. The oven was running cool.
So, Hope adapted. There was no way to get a new oven and no sense in wasting time complaining to the contest referees. She nudged the dial higher, and she moved faster. Hope had aimed to take her time getting her ingredients perfectly prepared, but instead, she picked up her pace.
She’d need to get her crustless pie in earlier because it would take longer to cook; she’d also need to compensate for the longer bake. This could mean the dish could wind up too dry, so she upped the liquid ingredients. Competitors couldn’t add an ingredient that wasn’t on their preapproved list, but they could change quantities based on taste, temperature, and whatever conditions presented themselves.
Adapt, adjust, test, pivot, and above all, keep your cool in the Vegas heat. Hope did it all. Instead of swearing or panicking, she remembered her Happy Kitchen philosophy and tried to stay in that zone, even under this scrutiny.
Her local judges called this Crustless Zucchini dish “better than crack.” A recipe that was “better than crack” didn’t just happen. You made it happen with every shake of salt and stir of the spatula.
Hope felt ease and happiness with how it all turned out, even before she put her dish in the oven. She had been in cooking competitions where she couldn’t find a flow. Where it was stop and start. Where no matter what she did, incessant hiccups interrupted the process. But not this time. She moved fluidly, handled problems, and rode her nerves to her benefit instead of letting them spin her heart rate out of control.
She stayed on target.
Competitors had a ten-minute window to present plated food to the judges’ tent. That was it. Other times, Hope had been in the position of having to run to the judges’ table, pushing a cart, or balancing a tray, with only a second to spare. But not this time. She took her dish out of the oven. She plated the required number of servings in her adorable crème-colored ramekins. She took care to make sure each serving looked perfect, with a meticulously placed medallion of zucchini perched on the rim.
She had a dozen to get just right. She didn’t want to risk one rogue judge getting an ugly serving and then marking her entry down for presentation or inconsistency.
Hope looked over her dishes one last time, and with a full three minutes to spare, she placed them on the tray.
She took a deep breath and settled the tray in her arms.
She had a sea of spectators to weave through without dumping the tray all over.
The lane from the kitchen set-ups to the judges’ tent was now like theFast and the Furious. If you got in the way, you’d be so much roadkill.
On the first day of competition, two cooks in the burger category crashed into each other and sent their dishes flying. They were both knocked out of the running.
Hope wasn’t going to trip on the way to the finish line. She sailed forward, past other competitors who were in the throes of abject panic.
This was it. If you hadn’t finished plating by now, your dish might taste great, but the odds were you didn’t have time to take the care required to make it look lovely.
Originality and, of course, taste were important, but if you slapped something down that looked sloppy, you’d lose valuable points.
Her crustless zucchini pie dish looked lovely; she knew that she hadn’t left it to chance. She glided past the spectators. She didn’t hear the clapping.
This was food as sport, no doubt. And part of the sport was being fueled, not flummoxed, by the crowd.
Hope kept her focus. She got to the window and carefully submitted her entry. They checked her badge: Marcia H. Venerable, Recipe Competitor.
She signed a card, verifying that she was turning in her entry. She watched as they took it away, into the tent, to the twelve judges who would taste all the entrees and decide which was the very best and which cook would win the title and one hundred thousand dollars.
