I am not a very competitive person. In most cases, all I want is to have fun and be able to look back on the experience and not feel like I wasted my time. Well two weeks ago, I think I found the perfect type of competition for me: cooking competitions.
It all started back in August when I was interning at Renewable Energy Group in Ames, IA. REG throws a large company celebration for a whole week each August where each day they hold fun events and activities. This year they decided to bring in the International Chili Society (ICS) to hold a chili cook-off competition right on REG’s front lawn. The ICS had recently moved its headquarters from California to Des Moines. Sanctioned chili cook-off events are held all over the United States (and apparently internationally) where chili enthusiasts can qualify to come to the world championships in various different chili categories. Two days before our competition at REG, one of the coordinators of the event came up to me and asked me to enter the vegetarian category because we needed one more person to make it a sanctioned event so that the winners could attend the world championships. I agreed to enter even though I was really skeptical of vegetarian chili. On top of that, I had only ever made chili ONCE before, and it was in the crock pot while I was away at class. I recruited my friend Karly who sat next to me at REG to help me come up with a recipe to use for the cook-off. I wanted to make a white chili, but needed to find something to substitute in place of the chicken. Karly suggested we use potatoes to replace the chicken, and I figured we had nothing to lose, so we went with it!
Fast forward to the competition at REG, and attendees were very skeptical about my “chili” as they were walking around and checking out this random event that had been brought to the front lawn of our office building. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I was kind of just adding ingredients at random. Karly joined me towards the end and helped with taste testing and final preparations before it was time to dish up a sample to take over to the judges table. We had so much fun that afternoon and weren’t expecting to be able to beat the real vegetarians at making vegetarian chili. Much to our surprise, awards started and we had won the veggie category with our white potato chili! Shocked and excited, we accepted our offer to compete in the world championship chili cook-off in September.
So two weeks ago Karly and I packed up every kitchen utensil we had between our apartments and scrounged up large pots from our friends in order to cook the roughly eight gallons we were required to serve to the public at the championships. We truly had no idea what we were getting into. It wasn’t until a few days before that I learned that all other competitors would be bringing their own cooktop...I didn’t know people actually did this competitively in their free time! We stopped at Walmart and loaded up on ingredients before arriving at the competition early on Saturday morning to start prepping our “people’s choice” chili to serve to the public. Luckily the nice people from ICS understood that I was not a professional chili cook, and they gave me a stovetop to use. We set up our station and the competitors around us were smirking at our lack of preparedness for the weekend. Luckily, we had Saturday to figure things out as Sunday was the day we would actually be preparing our competitive chili.
The whole weekend was a blast. We didn’t really use a recipe which made things exciting, and our chili turned out great considering we are amateurs at this whole cooking competition thing. Although we didn’t end up placing in the top five and winning any prizes, it was still a valuable experience. And before anyone asks me, I don’t have a recipe and I don’t think I could replicate that delicious chili if I tried.
Thanks for reading! Now go out on a whim and try something new. You may just figure out your life’s calling.
