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Thursday, April 05, 2001 By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Post-Gazette
ECONOMY, Pa. -- Pat Harmon is research and development in action, and it's not unusual for her to lie awake in bed at night, ideas spinning like a beater in batter.
Her laboratory is her avocado kitchen with its coppertone refrigerator and avocado range, circa 1970s. Her showroom is a small walk-through room, where the Pillsbury Doughboy plays, the cookie cutters shine, and her collection of Pillsbury Bake-Off books -- all of them except No. 1 -- stand sentinel. In the spare bedroom, she logs her successes and her failures, her joys and regrets, onto a generic PC.
Pat Harmon of Economy enters recipe contests. She doesn't get paid for her long hours of R&D unless she wins. Today, she is flying to Sacramento, Calif., and tomorrow she will represent Pennsylvania in the 44th National Chicken Cooking Contest. First prize is $25,000. The contest for the 51 contestants includes air fare, hotel, food and a tour of Old Sacramento and the Napa Valley.
Harmon takes a businesslike approach to contests. She won't enter a good recipe for the chance to win an apron. "I try for the cash. Trips are good, too."
Harmon has to be prodded to take us to her inner sanctum of contesting, where her computer is wedged between her sewing machine and a bed. She doesn't know exactly how many recipes she invents in a year, but a cruise through her collated copies of the monthly Cooking Contest Chronicle newsletters for 2000 reveals that she submits recipes at least once a week -- often multiple entries. Although some competitors send in a stack of recipes without even testing -- or tasting them -- them, she does not.
One in an occasional series on local people in the kitchen
Contest sponsors run the gamut. Sun-Maid. Taste of Home magazine. Snow's Clams. Land O'Lakes. Better Homes and Gardens (two a month).
What could be more cost-effective for companies than enlisting cooks all over America to develop recipes that require their product? There are so many contests, including magazines and newspapers, that whole information centers have sprung up. At least once a day Harmon logs onto Cooking Contest Central, and she may spend an hour checking out contests to come, contests to enter, contests to spurn.
"I can't imagine one more way to make chili," she says. There are many chili contests, but she leaves them to others.
Perhaps it was the 1996 Pillsbury Bake-Off that threw a line to Pat Harmon and hooked her into the contest milieu. One of the three recipes she sent that first year earned her a spot among the 100 finalists, all expenses paid to Dallas. She didn't win but she got into the finals again in 1998 with a dish that used taco seasoning mix. Third time wasn't the charm, though, and she ended up sitting out the Bake-Off in San Francisco.
"I'm still kind of bitter," she jokes, dishing up a sample of Apricot Tea Braised Chicken Thighs, which is her entry in tomorrow's chicken cook-off.
When she was a Pillsbury finalist, she explains with a wry grin, "We each got a $69.95 KitchenAid hand mixer, but finalists in 2000 got a $1,500 GE Advantium oven. Where's the parity?"
She'll get some goodies this week in Sacramento, though. A Calphalon Sauteuse pan, for one thing, Cutco cutlery and cutting board for another.
To illustrate some big contests' commitment to equal opportunity, an organizer called last week to find out what color onion she needed for her recipe -- she said yellow.
Though Harmon hopes to win, she's almost as excited about meeting some of the contesters she's chatted with online. She'll recognize them, she thinks, because she's seen their pictures. Harmon sent in her own photo to appear on the site in the contest Hall of Fame. She says "some of the real serious ones" don't participate in the computer discussions, though.
Hard-core contestants, these.
In 1997 the chicken contest took a cutthroat turn at Hilton Head, S.C., where judges found notes pushed under their hotel room doors and slipped in among their papers in the judges' room. The notes charged that one of the recipes was the same as one that had won a previous contest -- the contestant had simply switched the pork to chicken.
"We didn't expect this kind of sour grapes in a cooking contest," recalls judge Joe Crea, then food editor of The Blade of Toledo, now of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
But the judges ruled that at least three important changes had been made to the recipe, making it eligible for the grand prize.
Harmon says the standard among contesters is three to five changes -- and that's not just a little more of a certain spice -- makes a new recipe.
What marketers perceive as The Next Big Ingredient can propel a person into the money. Or a cookbook. Or a grill. Or an apron.
"Thai things win," says Harmon. "Asian is still here. Putting cumin in things wins contests. Fennel -- I did use it in the beef contest."
The be-all, end-all of contests, of course, is to ferret out recipes so appealing -- often quick, too -- that they will inspire people to buy the brand product. It's not impossible to find the skinless, boneless thighs that Harmon uses in her recipe, but it was tougher to locate Hansen's drinks for a Woman's Day contest. "I got it at Big Lots, of all places," she says of the store in Cranberry.
She speaks admiringly about Claudia Shepardson of Loudonville, N.Y., who has been contesting for only a year, but has brought down a number of prizes, including the $5,000 "Rice to the Rescue." She'll be in Sacramento, too.
Contestants have three hours to complete their dishes twice, and we couldn't help but wonder if the sponsoring National Chicken Council and U.S. Poultry and Egg Association have a contingency plan in case of a power problem in the energy-short state. Generators, maybe, perhaps a windmill or two.
Shouldn't be a problem, says Bill Mattus, president of the California Poultry Federation because Sacramento has its own municipal energy source, so it hasn't been part of the rolling blackouts that have hit other parts of the state.
"It'll be a long shot" if the stoves stop during the cook-off, he says. "The convention center is tied in with the hospital, so it's the last thing to go off. If that happens, then I guess the whole state is in big trouble."
If a blackout strikes, this could go down in contest annals like the 1996 Orlando Pillsbury Bake-Off, during which competitors barely missed a tornado.
Harmon and other wannabe winners of the $1 million Pillsbury Bake-Off have taken a wait-and-see attitude about the contests. The General Mills buyout of Pillsbury, still awaiting government approval, may thrust Betty Crocker products into the melee if the contest survives.
"We've heard it will continue, but nobody knows what products will be used," says Harmon.
The "we" is the contesting contingent, which has a grapevine to rival the Las Vegas bookies. They even have their own shorthand.
"I got an affy" translates to "I got an affidavit saying I'm a finalist."
"You got the chicken call!" means congratulations for being a chicken cook-off finalist.
Contesters used to worry about the cost of postage -- virtually eliminated thanks to computerized entries -- but there's one drawback seldom mentioned: eating all that food.
Harmon's husband, Paul, retired after 40 years with Armco, Ambridge, is an enthusiastic taster. Not all families are.
"I'm lucky Paul is willing," Harmon says.
In the beginning, maybe a little too willing. "Gained 20 pounds," he says. "She was into desserts."
She's still an avid dessert inventor but limits testing to once a month when her church has its fish fry and inherits her treats for the accompanying bake sale.
Not all rewards are monetary. Harmon couldn't be prouder of the beautiful photo of her Warm Apple Buttermilk Custard Pie that graces the pages of the slick 1999 "Southern Living Annual Recipe Book." Incidentally, that recipe's not really Pat's anymore. Entering a contest usually means handing over the rights to the recipe.
Enter the Pillsbury Bake-Off and your creation belongs to Pillsbury. Create a dish for Lawry's Marinade and it belongs to that company. Do the R&D for a dynamite dish using Mrs. Dash seasoning, and the Missus gets to dash off with it.
It gets hazy, though, when a recipe doesn't make the contest cut. Does it revert to its inventor? Harmon has a recipe file for what she considers winners, though the judges didn't. They sleep in the "redo" file of her computer and may some day be adapted for another contest.
She is an orderly woman. Her files include 2000-sent, redo, not sent, 2001-sent, pillideas. And then there's the Forget Me Not program, which pops up not only a reminder of her friend's 80th birthday, but also contest deadlines.
Some contests don't even require that a recipe be original, says Harmon, who pays meticulous attention to every rule.
Contest sponsors continue to raise the bar -- faster, more foolproof, fewer ingredients -- but contesting is not without its tricks. If you must limit ingredients, you can list "sugar, divided," and the sugar that goes in the cake can also show up in the icing.
"If you need some oil you might use sundried tomatoes packed in oil," Harmon advises.
Some women read catalogs to formulate their spring fashion wish list. Pat Harmon reads cookbooks in bed.
"I have an ulterior motive -- I think, how could I change this to make it a winner?'" she says with a grin. Nothing like dozing off over an artichoke dip.
Harmon also spends hours in front of a screen, but it's not the TV. About the only show she watches is what her husband of 26 years calls "The Young and the Useless." "Survivor," too, she admits.
Few things get Harmon's creative juices activated quicker than the name game. There's Appalachian Pea-Pickers Salsa (it contains black-eyed peas) and Maple Mango Tango Salmon, for starters.
Contesting sometimes makes her buy products she wouldn't normally, such as prepared beef, for that cook-off. "It'd cost a fortune for a family," says the grandmother of five.
Although the word obsessed isn't mentioned by Harmon, who retired nearly five years ago as a clerk in the treasurer's office in the Beaver County Courthouse, she admits she may get a little carried away. Take a recent February day. It was snowing in Economy. Harmon was ready to grill.
"I just had it in my head I wanted to do it right then," she says. "It was a London broil with grilled polenta. I was on a polenta kick."
As much as she loves the thrill of the grill, it doesn't rule her life. She didn't enter the garlic contest last year, for instance, because it would have conflicted with her grade school reunion.
Today, three time zones away in sunny California, she's probably sorting through the stuff she took with her -- the seasonings, her favorite knife, the harvest gold electric skillet from home. "They said they would provide a nice Calphalon pan, but I'm taking mine. I know how it works."
She chose chicken thighs because, "I read somewhere that if the winning recipe uses thighs, you get an extra thousand dollars."
Some contenders complain about the niggling rules that are part and parcel of contesting.
"I don't," she says firmly. "They're challenging us. And they're the ones giving the $25,000."
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The inner sanctum
