Christina's Creative Cooking Challenge (contest)

by Christina Meyer-Jax MS, RDN, LDN - Tastemaker in Residence

photo by Christina Meyer-Jax

Creative Cooking Challenge (contest)

As a Minnesota native, I’ve had my share of cooped up snow days in the house.  Now that we are all in a global “stay at home” experience I am bringing back one of my favorite family and friend activities…the “Creative Cooking Challenge”.  It’s really a riff off of all the food TV shows and can be sliced and diced (ha! Pun intended) many ways.

These have typically been done in person and still can be within your household unit. But now we can make these happen near and far with using video chat platforms too.

This week I’ll be hosting a Creative Cooking Challenge virtually on Zoom with my friends and neighbors.  We are all use to being together and now going stir crazy (another cooking pun! make this stop!) this could help all our sanity!

The sky is the limit on ways to approach, but here are some options:

The Set-Up

1. Send out an invite (time, date) and link or method you will use for the video chat.

2. Send out a brief description and timeline of how the challenge/contest will go.  Don’t give away all the “mystery ingredients” or detailed rules quite yet.

3. Decide ahead of time if there will be competition within the household, or if each household is working in teams.  Put that detail in the invite.

4. Let the participants know what the evaluation criteria will be (see eval criteria below)

The Challenge or Contest

Sample Idea -Appetizers

Announce the challenge rules:

1. Get a team together (no more than 4 in a group, if more people-then have two teams)

2. You will have 30 minutes from the time the organizer says “Go” to put your recipe together

3. Meal type: Appetizer

4. Items you must use:

-2 canned items

-1 fruit item

-2 items in your fridge that are starting to expire or go bad (obviously use your best judgment as we don’t want anyone to get sick)

-Mystery Item (since we aren’t able to hand out exact ingredients, we need to give some challenging options). Options: pickles, olives, fermented food, oatmeal, frosting, chocolate, etc.

The Evaluation and Sharing

1. After 30 minutes is up (organizer should give a 5-minute warning), have everyone stop and get ready to share their dish.

2. Each team can take a few minutes to discuss their dish in the following ways:

-Why they chose their ingredients

-What type of cuisine it is

-What makes this a great tasting dish

-What challenges did they have

-Would they make it again

3. The other teams can take a moment to evaluate/rate on the following criteria: (could do a scale of 1 being lowest – 5 being highest)

-Attractiveness of dish (does it look visually appealing)

-Creativity in the recipe (do the ingredients seems like they work together/taste good)

-Good use of ingredients that were close to expiration

-Sales pitch discussing recipe was convincing

4. Every team goes around to discuss their ratings on why they chose it.  Depending on the size of the groups on video chat, we may need to speed this part up a bit.

5. You can make it a “contest” and pick who wins, or challenge where everyone just enjoys the process and discussion.

6. If there are some fun recipes, you could also have each team share out their “recipe creations”.

7. Eat and enjoy!

Other challenge criteria options:

-Healthy (lower fat, nutrient-dense, high fiber, lower calories, low sugar, etc)

-All pantry items (no fridge)

-All freezer items

-Different meal types (breakfast, dessert, beverages)

In the end, the fun is the process of cooking and sharing with the use of technology to help bring us together.  Be well and stay safe all ☺!