Big Recipe Contest - Taste of Something Better

The folks at LG Electronics along with one of my favorite cooking magazines, Bon Appétit are looking for “foodies, gourmands and gastronomes” to enter their Taste of Something Better recipe contest and cooking competition. They are looking for “original recipes from “amateur chefs across the nation, challenging top entrants to a cook-off in the LG kitchen at the highly anticipated Bon Appétit Supper Club & Café® in New York City this September. ”

The competition is open to all “home chefs and cooking enthusiasts” but professional chefs are not allowed to enter. You are asked to submit your favorite “entree recipe for a chance to demonstrate (your) culinary chops first-hand in a national cook-off event.” The top three recipe finalists will be selected by renowned chefs and food critics and get the chance to participate in the LG “Taste of Something Better” competition in New York City.

“Some of the best culinary innovations were born out of the home kitchen, and we would like to recognize and give amateur chefs the opportunity to share their masterpieces with the world,” said Peter Reiner, senior vice president, marketing and strategy, LG Electronics USA. “LG strives to make everyone feel like a talented chef by providing them with the tools to cook up something better in the kitchen, including our a new line of gas cooktops, built-in wall ovens and ranges, all blending powerful performance and sleek, contemporary design.”

The competitors in the New York City event will have a chance to represent the United States in LG’s global “Life Tastes Good” cooking competition taking place in Bangkok, Thailand in November. The top three competitors can win

• Grand prize:  Trip for two to Thailand to compete in LG’s global cooking competition, a premium LG kitchen package, including gas cooktop, double wall oven,  4-door French-door refrigerator, dishwasher and microwave oven, along with $1,000 to enjoy while in New York for the competition.
• Runner-up: LG premium appliance package including gas cooktop, double wall oven and 4-door French-door refrigerator, along with $1,000 to enjoy while in New York.
• Second runner-up: LG double wall oven, along with $1,000 to enjoy while in New York.

How To Enter

For more information, answers to your questions and how to enter your recipe, go to  www.lgcookbetter.com.

Looks like fun with a chance for some great prizes.

It’s that of the year again when I holiday at the Jersey shore with my family in Avalon and will be sharing with you recipes, cooking techniques and restaurant reviews from my favorite vacation destination. Our first night down here we enjoyed our traditional first meal of local Jersey tomatoes with fresh Mozzarella and basil, local corn on the cob, and a whole bunch of steamers. My 9 & 11 year old daughters love them so we now order 100 of them for a meal and unfortunately there are never any left over for linguine and clam sauce the next night.

The Jersey sweet corn this year is as good as I’ve ever seen it and the tomatoes are excellent. Jersey Shore Steamers dipped in melted butter may not be the most healthy item on our menu but they sure taste good.

Our second night we repeated the tomatoes, mozzarella & basil along with the local corn on the cob (like most nights we are down here until we get sick of them but I doubt that) and delicious grilled cheeseburgers. I say delicious because my daughter’s twin friends enjoyed dinner with us and they thought they were the best burgers they ever had. I’ll take that compliment from a couple of 11 year olds any time.

I think the trick to great burgers is 80% - 20% mixture of lean and fatty meat, finely chopped onions in the mixture, let the kids make the burgers in various shapes like hearts, stars, donuts & one they called Billy Maze, don’t overwork the meat and don’t overcook the burgers.  Finally, bring your kids to the beach and get them really hungry by talking long walks and swimming in the ocean. Serve them anything and they will think it is the best they ever had.

Related Topics

Grilled Scallops and Nectarines with Jersey Corn and Tomato Salad

Jersey Shore Steamers

How To Grill Corn On The Cob

Jersey Sweet Corn

Happy Father’s Day

Here’s me this morning in bed on Father’s Day with a meal prepared by my youngest daughter (9) with some help from her mother. Here’s what’s on their menu:

Aebleskiver - Danish Pancakes served with powdered sugar
Bacon
Fresh Lancaster, PA strawberries
Blueberries
Fresh Orange Juice
Hazelnut Coffee

What a treat for me and my daughter was thrilled she could be involved preparing this meal. Like I always say, “Kids Can Cook.”

Doesn’t get any better than this. Here’s a little history of how Father’s Day was started sent to me from a friend back in Park City, Utah. Hope you enjoy it.

Father’s Day History

The idea for an official Father’s Day celebration came to a married daughter, seated in a church in Spokane, Washington, attentive to a Sunday sermon on Mother’s Day in 1910-two years after the first Mother’s Day observance in West Virginia.

The daughter was Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd. During the sermon, which extolled maternal sacrifices made for children, Mrs. Dodd realized that in her own family it had been her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, who had sacrificed-raising herself and five sons alone, following the early death of his wife in childbirth. For Mrs. Dodd, the hardships her father had endured on their eastern Washington farm called to mind the unsung feats of fathers everywhere.

Her proposed local Father’s Day celebration received strong support from the town’s ministers and members of the Spokane YMCA. The date suggested for the festivities, June 5th, Mrs. Dodd’s father’s birthdays were three weeks away-had to be moved back to the nineteenth when ministers claimed they need extra time to prepare sermons on such a new subject as Father.

Newspapers across the country, already endorsing the need for a national Mother’s Day, carried stories about the unique Spokane observance. Interest in Father’s Day increased. Among the first notables to support Mrs. Dodd’s idea nationally was the orator and political leader William Jennings Bryan, who also backed Mother’s Day. Believing that fathers must not be slighted, he wrote to Mrs. Dodd, “too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child.”

Father’s Day, however, was not so quickly accepted as Mother’s Day. Members of the all-male Congress felt that a move to proclaim the day official might be interpreted as a self-congratulatory pat on the back.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended that states, if they wished, should hold their own Father’s Day observances. He wrote to the nation’s governors that “the widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and also to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”

Many people attempted to secure official recognition for Father’s Day. One of the most notable efforts was made in 1957, by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who wrote forcefully to Congress that “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.”

Eventually, in 1972-sixty-two years after it was proposed-Father’s Day was permanently established by President Richard Nixon. Historians seeking an ancient precedent for an official Father’s Day observance have come up with only one: The Romans, every February, honored fathers-but only those deceased.

In America today, Father’s Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion, with about 85 million greeting cards exchanged.