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Contest winner heading to wine country
By JoAnn Jones
PULASKI, PA.
After Kim Porterfield of Pulaski, Pa., won the pasta division of the local Our Valley Cooks contest early this year — the first cooking contest she had ever entered — she said she thought, “Wow! That’s pretty cool. Maybe I’ll try it again.”
That second attempt paid off as well as she won a regional competition in the Beringer Wine Great Steak Challenge in Washington. D.C. Aug. 5 to earn a spot in the cook-off finale at the Beringer Vineyards in Napa Valley, Calif., on Oct. 8.
“I absolutely just couldn’t believe I had won,” Porterfield said. “We cooked live in a huge tent in front of more than 200 people who each paid $65 to drink Beringer wine and watch us.”
Porterfield’s recipe for Oyster Rockefeller Filets, inspired by one of her favorite appetizers, Oysters Rockefeller, earned her an all-expense-paid trip and an opportunity to compete against nine other regional finalists.
“It’s a four-day, three-night trip that includes wine tours and tastings,” she said. “Twenty-five percent of the contest is the pairing of wine with the meal. Some in the Washington competition cooked with it, but I didn’t. I did pair it with Beringer’s Pinot Noir.”
Describing the Washington competition as stressful, Porterfield said the steak recipe had to be made totally on the grill in 30 minutes.
“My grill quit working and they put me on another one,” Porterfield said. “I turned around and my meat was gone. The chef had moved it.”
“The other nine contestants were all involved in the food business,” she said. “I was definitely the newbie. But I’m not now.”
Porterfield grilled bread to go along with the filets, and then waited for the judges — wine expert Tim Valis, Fox 5 WTTG TV personality Melanie Alnwick and executive chef and Belga Caf owner Bart Vandaele — to make their decision.
“They took forever to score,” Porterfield said. “My stress level was so high, I cried. That whole night I kept saying, ‘I can’t believe I won.”
She added that it was a thrill to meet two of the judges for the upcoming national competition — cooking guru Paula Deen’s sons Jamie and Bobby.
Porterfield, who lives on a farm of almost 200 acres, considers herself a homemaker after previously being part of the real estate industry. She does a lot of canning and freezing from a “pretty large garden” and is proud of her bread and butter hot peppers, jalapeno mustard and canned salsa.
“I make lots of that[salsa], and I give it away,” she said. “I take things to parties and give them to friends. People who don’t have gardens appreciate it.”
Porterfield also said she cooks “strangely” as she has numerous cookbooks but doesn’t cook out of them; she just reads them.
“I can’t be creative if I use a cookbook,” she said. “I keep a notebook in my purse and write down things that interest me. Since we don’t have a lot of TV [channels] in this area, I can’t watch all the cooking shows. I read magazines and do research on the Internet to get knowledge about what goes together.”
“I tried my recipe on my friends first,” she said, adding that she was having a huge party and cooking small portions of the recipe. She also tried the recipe on her brother, Craig Morrison of Canfield, who is one of her biggest supporters.
“Her dish was one of 100 selected out of 8000 entries,” Morrison said. “Now she’ll go on to cook her recipe against nine other winners of their respective subdivisions.”
Porterfield said she had only two weeks between receiving a phone call telling her that her recipe had qualified for regional competition and actually going to Washington. Now she has two months to practice her recipe before going to California.
“The first prize is $15,000, second is $7,500 and third is $2,500,” Porterfield said. “The trip alone is worth $7,000.”
“I’ve been a lot of places,” she added, “but I’ve never been there. It’s supposed to be beautiful. And it will be a heck of a lot more fun if I can say, ‘I won.’”