I’m scheduled to appear on Rochester's Channel 10 (NBC) on Monday morning. People from the station will arrive at my house at 4:30 a.m.! I’ll be on at various times from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. I honestly don't know how the morning news people work such ungodly hours.
I have been asked if I contact the newspapers and TV stations about contests. The answer is NO - never! The PR people from the cooking contests are the ones who contact the media, because one of the reasons they hold the contests is to get publicity. Since much of my career has been in public relations, I'm pretty empathetic with the contest PR people and I try to be as accommodating as I can.
Anyway, Channel 10 asked me to talk about the contests I’ve been in and give advice for people who want to enter cooking contests. They also asked me to demonstrate recipes that show how I develop a recipe for contests. I had to give this some thought because I don’t want to give away recipe ideas that I think have potential. I settled on cheesecakes because I did a lot of cheesecake testing for a contest a little over a year ago, and one of the recipes just won a smaller prize.
This means, however, that the weekend is going to be busier than expected. I’ll bake two cheesecakes, because you can’t cut and eat a cheesecake right out of the oven. One of the recipes will need tinkering from the original submission. But the big thing is that I’ll have to clean, and I sure do hate to clean. I’d much rather be writing for Rah Cha Chow ... but that may not happen between now and then!
