2011 November | La Petite Chef Catering

This past Sunday La Petite Chef took part in a cooking competition and came in first! The name of the comeptition, Not Your Baba’s Borscht. The Children’s of Chernobyl organized this fundraiser for their sub charity, Dishing for Dzherelo. Dzherelo is a rehabilitation center in Ukraine that works with children of special needs. Ukraine is seriously lacking in government run programs for people with special needs so organizations like this are extremely important. We jumped at the chance to get involved.

What were we going to compete for? The golden beet. By making the best borscht and passing the scrutiny of judges as well as all the audience the winner would take home this trophy and have ample bragging rights to boot.

Competitors were Chef Anthony Rose, Drake Hotel, Chef Donna Dooher Mildred’s Temple Kitchen, Exec. Sous Chef Jeff Dueck Art Gallery of Ontario and Tatiana Shabotynsky of La Petite Chef.

Everyone had really interesting interpretations, Chef Anthony used smoked brisket, Donna Dooher and her crew used golden beets and Chef Dueck used candy cane beets.We decided on a traditional red borscht with wild mushroom dumplings called Ushka, dill and sour cream swirl and a side crostini topped with pork liver pate.

Lynn Crawford was an amazing host and I have never met anyone with so much energy. Anne Yaramovich and her crew also prepared a mouth watering lunch inspired by the menu at Veselka. Veselka is a Ukrainian restaurant in New York which is famous for it’s borscht. The owner, Tom Birchard was one of the judges. The remaining two judges were Malcolm Jolley of Good Food Revolution and Olga Stanko as the honorary “baba” representative.

The instructions we received were the following;

The Competition:

Each Chef will prepare and serve 253 small portions of their borshch entry.

Each guest, and each judge will receive a taster of your soup anonymously labelled for judging.

The Borshch should be your interpretation of best borshch ever!

The only criteria is that it should contain beets, and it should have some kind of souring agent.

It need not be authentic, and it can express your preferred style of cuisine.

Judging Criteria:

Presentation 20%

Taste 50%

Creativity 10%

Novel or impressive use of ingredients 10%