The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [124]
That summer, 2008, would turn out to be the hottest, sweatiest, and most collision-worthy season of communal cooking for me yet. First, there were tons of cook-offs to attend. Over the last year, Karol and I had become pretty regular participants in local amateur cook offs. Karol’s obsession preceded mine, and our friends David and Shana had been bitten by the cook-off bug, too. Any type of cook-off, and anywhere in the city: a pie bake-off on Governor’s Island, a chili cook-off in a bar we’d never heard of, you named it. Just what was an amateur cook-off in New York City like? In a nutshell, they were infrequent special events where anyone could enter their homemade dish to win cash, bar prizes, and bragging rights. They were usually held in bars, organized by someone who worked there, or an outside host who’d gotten the bar’s permission. The rules were simple: Cook up a batch of X, in the biggest pot you owned, haul it to the cook-off venue by whatever means possible, talk about how you made it as you serve it up, while other contestants serve up their versions, sample everyone else’s food until you are stuffed silly, and await judgment time, when it was announced whose X was the best. Prizes might be given out, or for smaller cook-offs the winner might receive just a bar tab. The winner was often determined by audience vote: Anyone in attendance could write the name of their favorite on a slip of paper and submit it. But many cook-offs had a panel of judges, pulled together by various affiliations with the host and having some pedigree in the professional food world.
One of the main reasons cook-offs appealed to me was that they offered a unique mode of interaction over food—competition—and only the home-cooked kind. Because the food wasn’t made by professionals for a profit, I didn’t count filling up on an assortment of homemade chili as “eating out,” even if the event was held inside a bar or restaurant. I appreciated the social atmosphere of these events, hungry as I was for that now that I was living alone. Plus, everyone I met at cook-offs definitely had one thing in common: a love of home cooking. Karol and I began entering cook-offs, determined each time to invent the most mind-blowingly delicious, creative version of X at first. I’d like to think that each time we did, too. We didn’t make the food just to impress others, but to contemplate, experiment, and come up with our best effort, for ourselves—usually spending weeks mulling over our recipes, and at least a whole day preparing them. Karol made a sweet potato chili with all kinds of fresh peppers and chipotle, and once achieved her dream of pulling off a checkerboard pattern out of pumpkin and cheese-cake pie filling on a winning pie of hers. I made a salsa that riffed on the Bloody Mary once, with horseradish, celery, and olives, just for the heck of it, and succeeded in concocting a creamy, fresh watermelon juice pie that was more or less watermelon panna cotta with a graham cracker crust, and chocolate chips as the “seeds.” It didn’t matter whether we won or not after a while. We’d become friendly with a bunch of like-minded home cooks who’d enter the events often, too. I enjoyed getting to know their cooking styles, and it was always fun seeing what someone did to outdo themselves since the last cook-off—and maybe to outdo the person who’d won that one the last time. I found it fascinating to see how other nonprofessional chef-foodies like me liked to cook. How did they achieve this or that effect? How