Today I helped with the Taste of Home Cooking Show in Hutchinson, Kansas. We do the show in the sports arena, with a makeshift kitchen. This is a snapshot from backstage at the start of the day. It's amazing what you can do with enough organization and enough people.
We come in the morning and prep everything and make the dish to show. We chop, package, saute, measure and do anything we can to make it go smoothly when the show is actually happening on stage. Everything is very organized with detailed instructions for us to follow.
Then we come back in the evening and help out on stage, bringing whatever he needs to make the recipe in front of the audience.
The host from Taste of Home was Guy Klinzing. He was here last year, too, and we all love him. He's really delightful to work with - very pleasant, kind, helpful and encouraging.
My recipe today was an asparagus strudel with filo pastry. He is always good about having everyone gather around when he's working with something unusual like filo dough so everyone can learn something about it. I had worked with it before, but picked up a couple of tips today.
I didn't get to taste it, but it was sure pretty when it was done! We had some filling left and we all took some home to try out, so I can report back, but it smelled heavenly and looked wonderful.
Guy is a great entertainer. Literally - he's an actor, who also happens to know cooking How fun is that? He gets the crowd up on their feet at various times during the show.
Tonight he had them doing a modified version of YMCA, only with "Taste of Home" as part of the song. The emcee was Bob Colladay, in the white shirt here. He's always great at playing along with anything and jumped right in.
It's a very tiring day - we start at 8:30 and today didn't finish the prep work until about 2 p.m., then had to be back at 5 and finished up about 11 tonight. This year the show has 10 recipes in, which seems like a lot, but I guess people are definitely getting their money's worth out of their ticket. It's interesting to see how the process works and I always enjoy doing it.
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