Some of you may remember that, up here in the Poultney village, we like to do a little thing called a cook off. It’s basically Iron Chef style rules, where there’s one main ingredient/kind-of-food and the rest is up to the chefs. We’ve been doing this thing for…jeez…two and a half years, I guess. It started with a Soup-Off, and since then, we’ve had a Pie Off, a Kabob Off, a Salsa Off, another Salsa Off, a Noodle Off, a Cocktail & Sandwich Off, a Loaf Off, and this past weekend, a Maple Off (I may be forgetting one or two Offs).

What’s been really cool is that the group of people who participate in the Cook Offs has changed a ton in these past two years. We started with friends who were in school with us, but the months and years passed, and students graduated, and staff and faculty joined, and now the batch of people we’ve got cooking is, I think, almost wholly different from the original. Out of the thirty or so people who attended the Maple Off, only three of us had been around for the Soup Off. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty cool.

But enough of the preliminaries. On to the Maple Off!

The rules of the game work like this. On a scale of 0.0 - 5.0, each entrant is judged on four categories:

• Presentation
• Ethics
• Originality
• Taste

The scores are then averaged across the board for an overall score. The person with the highest overall score is the champion. The prize is the right to determine the theme of the next Cook Off.

Oh, and you get to wear the Cook Off Tiara.

The last Cook Off before this one was the Loaf Off. I couldn’t attend because of grad school obligations, but my lovely wife was there, making — if I remember correctly — some kind of barley loaf. As you might imagine, the Loaf Off wasn’t a huge hit cooking-wise, so there were only two contestants (but a lot of judges). Out of the two entrants, my lovely wife and her barley loaf took home the crown.

With her rights as champion, Dawn selected that quintessential Vermont ingredient as the theme for the next Off. She sent out the e-mail, and by the time everyone had RSVP’d, we found ourselves hosting a Maple Off with fourteen entrants.

Dawn and I were supposed to enter the competition together. A lot of the married couples tend to do this, but we’d never partnered up before. She’d decided long before she asked me to be her partner that we were making a Maple Walnut Ice Cream. That sounded good to me, and I said I’d take care of making some sort of maple-flavored topping. After getting some input from our baker buddy, Angie, I decided on a Maple-Raspberry-Whiskey syrup (why whiskey? why not?).

But then, one week before the Maple Off, Dawn says, “Are you gonna make the syrup this week?” And I answer, “No, I’ll make it Saturday morning” (the morning of the Maple Off).

Now, I don’t know if you know Dawn, but she can be a bit of a control freak when it comes to the kitchen.

And the thought that I wasn’t going to make a test batch of the syrup was just too much for her.

So she kicked me off her team.

Yeah, that’s how she rolls.

“Fine,” I say, “I’ll just have to kick your ass Maple style.”

At some point during the week, and I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point during the week, I decided I was going to try to make deviled eggs, and somehow include maple.

So, Saturday morning rolls around, and Dawn jumps out of bed before sunrise (okay, maybe not that early, but close), ’cause she’s gotta get cracking on her ice cream. She’d made the batter the night before, but now she had to get it all mixed up and cold. For that, she used the Ice Cream Maker attachment for the Kitchen Aid Mixer.

Once she was done with that, we headed out to the grocery store to pick up some appetizers and beer, and so I could grab a few ingredients for the deviled eggs. Thankfully, our grocery store has a small section of Vermont made products, so my ingredients could all be locally produced, which is a major consideration if one wants to score any points in the ethics category.

But even more thankfully was what I found on the shelf: a jar of Maple Mustard, courtesy of the Vermont Epicureans. I now had my key ingredient.

While at the store, I also picked up a dozen free range, organic eggs, and on the way home from the store, we stopped by the house of one of Dawn’s co-workers so I could pick up another dozen eggs, which meant my deviled eggs would be half organic, half local, and all free range. Yep, that’s me, covering all the ethics bases.

So, we get home from the store and go about making our entrees. The final ingredients in my Maple Devilish Eggs included:

• Twice Roasted Jalepenos (roasted, cooled, and roasted again, then chopped up into a paste using our food processor)
• 12 organic, free range eggs
• 12 local, free range eggs
• Vermont Maple Country Mustard
• Hungarian Paprika (not so local)
• Hellman’s Mayonnaise (not so local)

About an hour later, the lovely Amber Roe arrives from the Lake George region of New York and takes over our kitchen.

Her dish had many parts. It was a kind of crisp with shredded parsnips, apples, and carrots, plus self-harvested fiddle heads sauteed in garlic and butter, topped with a slice of goat cheese and dressed with a maple-balsamic dressing. On top of that, she also brought a rhubarb pie with maple-walnut goat cheese.

Ridiculous.

While Amber was in the kitchen, Dawn set up the table of appetizers, I worked on putting together the spreadsheet that the judges would use to track their votes, and Vermont made itself pretty for the big event.

That’s when the other contestants started showing up. I think I mentioned earlier that we had fourteen entrants in the Maple Off, which means that the Maple Off may have been our biggest Off yet (the second Salsa Off and the Noodle Off probably come in a close second). And these people brought all kinds of food. There were pies, breads, cookies, salads, the whole shebang.

But perhaps the shebangingest of them all was Christina’s homebrewed keg of Maple Chocolate Stout. In this first picture, Christina’s spinning the keg around and around, trying to get it to carbonate; in the second pic, we’re all waiting for the first glass to be poured; and in the third pic, we’re learning that she might have spun the keg a bit too much.

With the keg ready to go and all the contestants arrived, the Maple Off was ready to begin. The first entrants were Laird and Christina. Christina brewed up the beer, and Laird made a batch of maple-glazed baked beans as an accompaniment.

Our three judges for the maple off got their steins and their beans, and set to work. Our judges for the day were the always jolly Ron Steffens, the inestimable Pat Moore, and the just-met-him-for-the-first-time-but-he-seems-like-a-nice-guy Todd Don’t Know His Last Name.

They sipped their beer, tasted their beans, and went inside to award their votes.

Next up on the docket was Mark and Eleanor’s Maple-Glazed Pork. The pork were a couple of “cute local pigs” taken from a nearby farm, glazed with maple tapped from the trees on the campus of Green Mountain College, and mixed with a bunch of locally harvested vegetables. It was delicious.

And yes, Mark is holding a cheat sheet.

With our two main courses out of the way, we decided we’d take a step back and have a salad. Luckily, Steve and Heather brought one. The greens were from their garden, and they topped it with a maple-balsamic vinaigrette, which also used maple tapped from GMC’s trees. There was more to it than that, and all of it had been grown or harvested by Steve and Heather themselves.

You gotta remember: these two are both specialists in ethics. Like…Ph.D in Philosophy-style ethics. They take this category every time. I don’t even know why the rest of us try to compete.

Anyway, here’s Steve making his introduction.

Please note, in the background,
the wide-eyed attentiveness on Christina’s face.

After the salad came the appetizer (that’s how we roll), so I stepped up to the edge of the deck and introduced my scrumptious Maple Devilish Eggs with Twice Roasted Jalepenos.

For those who care about these things, that is an “Adam’s & Sarah’s Wedding” beer koozie I’m holding.

How scrumptious were these babies? Well, ask Erin, because she had three.

I couldn’t believe it, but after my entry, the other people still wanted to keep the Maple Off going. I mean, why? They’d already tasted the best. What was the point?

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just step back, drink some beers, and let these fools have their fun.

Though I must have had too many beers, because I can no longer remember what Jessica, our next entrant, made. I know it began with “T” (tempura?) and I know it was pretty good, but as to what it was…you’ll just have to hope someone leaves the correct answers in the comments.

With the appetizer and tempura (?) out of the way, it was time to move on to the side dishes.

First up was Rob, who made what he called Northern Comfort Sweet Potatoes. The main ingredients were sweet potatoes, of course, but also maple syrup and Southern Comfort.

But he knew that wouldn’t be enough to win, so along with the Northern Comfort Sweet Potatoes, Rob took a page from Laird and Christina’s book and served up some alcohol: shots of Northern Comfort, which, as you might imagine, is a Southern Comfort with a few drips of Maple Syrup.

We’d been going for some hours now, and what with the beer, the shots, and all the food, the judges and all the rest of us were starting to get a little slow.

And that’s where my lovely control-freak wife comes in. Acting as the incredible hostess and emcee, Dawn gets the rest of us back on track.

“C’mon folks, eat up. We still have seven entries to go.”

Once Dawn got us all wrangled back into competitor mode, the next side-dish entrant stepped up to the front of the deck to introduce a ridiculously tasty concoction. Now that the sun had gone down and night had come on in full force, Amber decided she needed a little luminary assistance to compete on the presentation scale, so with the addition of a headlamp, she presented her dish.

With the side dishes done, it was time to move on to the desserts, of which there were several. First up was our upstairs neighbor, Annie Laurie, who put together a maple, rhubarb, coffe-cake kind of thing.

After Annie Laurie, Lindsay and Erin jumped to the fore with their Maple-Walnut Banana Bread.

Now, I’m not a banana-eating kind of guy. But the bread was pretty damned tasty. And amazingly, it was still warm, despite the fact that we’d been hanging out for at least a couple hours by this point.

And as a quick aside, I love this pic of Lindsay and Erin. Hey Colby, this is what your moms were doing a couple of weeks before you entered the world.

With the bread gone, we moved to Maureen’s pie. I don’t remember all the ingredients, but I do remember that it was gluten-free.

And as another quick aside…yes, there were two ready-to-pop pregnant ladies at the Maple Off (plus another, just-getting-her-baby-bump mom to be ((not pictured))).

After the pie came Anne’s AWESOME, AWESOME, AWESOME maple-gingerbreadshortbread cookies. These things were what cookies want to be when they grow up. If Anne ever decides that teaching’s not for her, she could definitely make a living out of selling these cookies.

After the cookies, Dawn presented her maple-walnut ice cream. She’d want me to mention that before the walnuts went into the ice cream, she glazed them in their own batch of maple, so it was like a maple-walnut maple ice cream. Also, earlier in the day, she tried to make maple-flavored ice cream cones using our pizzelle maker, but she couldn’t get the pizzelles to curve into a cone. Not one to be put off easily, however, Dawn decided that she’d scoop the ice cream onto the pizzelle pieces and serve them that way, as a kind of edible spoon.

I know I may be a little biased, but it was all very damn good.

We had one more entrant after Dawn’s ice cream, but unfortunately, we didn’t get a picture of him delivering the introduction. J.T. made “salvaged nonbake cookies,” and had quite the story to go along with them.

Here’s what you gotta know. I mentioned earlier that Dawn was one of two entrants into the Loaf Off. Well, J.T. and Rachel were the other entrants. Which means they came in second (from another angle, you could also say they came in last). Thinking that “second place” made them a shoo-in to win the Maple Off, J.T. decided that, instead of making something special, he’d just bring the leftover cookies that he’d served during the final exam in one of his classes, cookies that it-just-so-happens included the key ingredient of maple. Since “leftover cookies” didn’t sound so appetizing, J.T. rebranded them “Salvaged” cookies.

It turns out I only have one picture of J.T. from that night, and it’s a little blurry, but here it is anyway.

Sorry, J.T.

And that was it. All the entrants were in. The judges were stuffed. And the votes were ready for some tallying.

But before we get to the winners, here are some random shots from night.

Was that enough of a drum roll?

Well, if not, then here’s a pic of the judges reading off the list of winners.

Like little league coaches, the judges were great enough to make sure EVERY contestant was winner. We were awarded such titles as:

• Best Use of a Four Legged Animal: Mark & Eleanor
• Best Non-use of a Four Legged Animal: Steve & Heather
• Most “Spice Boy”: Yours truly
• Best Story: J.T.
• And the list goes on…just not in my memory.

Oh, I do remember one more: Best Came In Second By A Tenth Of A Point: Dawn Sarli!

Which means, god damn it, neither Dawn nor I would be taking home the crown. The Cook Off Tiara would no longer be in our domain.

And the Winner Is…

I quote from the new champion, “It’s crazy how much this means to me.”

With the winner decided, all the was left was the coronation ceremony.

The passing of the crown.

There she is…our Miss Maple Off Champion…

From all of us at Fluid Imagination, congratulations Amber! And thank you to our three stalwart judge: Ron, Todd, and Pat. Your bellies made all of us proud.

And just so y’all know, Amber has already decided the theme for the next cook off. So come sometime this summer, we’ll all be competing in The Burger Off.

Hope to see you there.