The Best Teen Chef Competition!!!

My story continues a few years later... The reason it skips a few years is because I did not have access to culinary classes in my High School, so I spent that time cooking a little and watching Food Network for the rest of the time. When I was a senior in High School and I was looking into colleges, I knew at least one thing... they had to have an amazing culinary program!!! The main school I was interested in was The Art Institute of Sacramento, their campus was incredibly clean and beautiful and the culinary program was ingenious with their own cafe!  So naturally that was the school for me, the sad news on this was that the tuition was way too expensive  so in my last efforts to get into the school of my dreams was to enter in the Best Teen Chef competition which if I won at nationals I would  receive a full-ride scholarship to The Art Institute!!! So to enter I had to invent a recipe and write an essay of why I thought The Art Institute was the school for me to attend.  So the recipe that I came up with was a dessert that combines my favorite dessert ever with one of my favorite flavor combinations.  The recipe was for a Chocolate-Orange Cheesecake, which I submitted and I got into the semi-finals of the competition!  Now the recipe is kind of long so instead of posting it on this post I am going to give you the link so that you can take a look at it.  I put it on a website where you could freely publish recipes, and I thought that it was extremely cool that I came up with this recipe all by myself being only seventeen years old at the time!  Here is the link...  http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,236,155179-237204,00.html. For the semi-finals of this competition I had to cook four separate dishes within a 90 minute period, very Iron Chef style LOL! We could be creative and that was my favorite part of this competition! All I can say is that I made some of the best food that I could have created.  Same thing as to where I placed in the competition, all they told of the 18 competitors is   the top 3 of which I was not mentioned.  So to this day I do not know where I placed :-( but it was not all bad, of course I was disappointed; however, I knew that I would grow from this experience, and I knew that it would change my life for better or for worse.  So the college I ended up going to is one with almost the same type of culinary program but in a community college setting! I ended up going to American River College, and I am loving every minute of it! The next stories will be of my adventures in my culinary classes!

I just realized that I did not give my email address for you to email me your questions and comments on this blog so here it is... mystuffandcooking@gmail.com