And we have a winner!

A couple of weeks ago Look, Cook, and Eat sponsored a cooking competition, Super Special Soups, at the venerable Iowa State Fair. The rules were simple: Anyone 16 or older with a disability was invited to enter a soup recipe (nine ingredients or fewer, please) along with a short story about why that soup was special. Prizes were great! First place: $200 + a saucepan from Kitchen Craft Cookware; 2nd place: $150 + said saucepan; 3rd place: $100 + the saucepan. Everyone who entered received a spiffy green silicone spatula emblazoned with the LCE logo and a one-year subscription to LCE. (For those not in the know, prizes in other state fair cooking competitions range from cash awards of $25 for first place to a year’s supply of instant yeast. As far as I’m concerned, cash is king; lots of it, even better.)

We had one entry.

I suspect there are many reasons why people didn’t enter. First and foremost, I got behind and didn’t adequately promote it to the organizations in Iowa who service those with special needs. My bad.

Second, I forgot how challenging it can be to navigate the sign-up processes required to enter cooking competitions at the Iowa State Fair. I’m not gonna lie–it’s confusing. Seems like it could be made much, much easier. Thankfully, there is an online process now (nonexistent when I was involved with sponsoring competitions many years ago when I worked for a magazine). But stuff like this can be hard for people of all stripes. That said, it once again drives home the need to always be aware of processes and trying to make them as easy as possible–a valuable lesson for us as we continue to develop LCE.

So I went into the competition feeling a little out of whack. There just seemed to be all sorts of loose ends and uncertainty, and I’m pretty sure I snapped at one of the grandmotherly volunteers who swarm around the Elwell Family Center where all these contest take place. I was not my usual charming self (this, to those who know me well, is a joke. I’m not very charming, ever). And then I get word that there’s only one entry. Disappointing.

But the show went on. Haley, my judging partner and dietitian extraordinaire at Hy-Vee grocery store, and I took our places, introduced ourselves to the record keepers and to the tiny audience, and we tasted our only soup of the day–cheeseburger, a favorite of mine. And with that, I could feel my shoulders ease a little. The recipe was easy to follow and had only nine ingredients, not to mention tasted amazing. It was the creation of Tyler Randall. (Full disclosure: I know Tyler, his sister, Nikki, and his brother-in-law.) Nikki texted me a photo of Tyler at the stove a couple of weeks before the fair, working perfecting his masterpiece. It was awesome.

I’ve since learned, from a former teacher of Tyler’s, that he did actually cook in Life Skills class when he was a student, so his story might’ve been a bit exaggerated, but I still found it charming.

Tyler was so excited to have won–you can tell by the photo, can’t you? I’m excited he won too. Next year we’ll have more participants because I’ll work harder at making sure those that need to know about it know about it. Maybe Tyler will enter again–he’ll be an expert at the stove by then after having cooked for a year with LCE. Plus, he’ll need to defend his title!

Life lesson #49423: Sometimes things don’t go perfectly but they usually turn out just like you’d hoped.