Is Anyone Still Doing Self-Portrait Wednesday?

I haven't seen a self-portrait post on anyone's blog

for a long time, but I always loved them.

Most of us hate to be the subject

of a photograph,

captured for all time

the way someone else sees us.

Bloggers, especially, at least the ones I know,

vastly prefer to be the one seeing through the lens.

But I told Relyn of Come Sit by My Fire that I'd take up
 the challenge to tell at least 7 things about myself

that aren't widely known.

So here goes,

complete with a self-portrait from last August

before those journeys of discovery

that were supposed to transform me.

1. When I was a 20-something and a feminist activist,

I won ribbons for my cooking at the State Fair of Texas.

A third place ribbon for salad (potato) the first year.

A third place ribbon for drop cookies,

a second place ribbon for spectacular desserts (puff pastry),

and a first place ribbon for salad,

the second year.

One of the salad judges came and told me that

it was an outrage that the Waldorf salad

was given best in show

because mine should have taken it,

but the other judges thought my salad

 was too expensive to make.

(And, I'll note, it had no mayonnaise.)

Ah - politics in the cooking world.

But I have to admit,

the third place/white ribbon

for drop cookies was the one that thrilled me most.

You see, there weren't many entries in the salad contests

or the spectacular desserts

or even the casseroles, a category in which I never competed.

Cookies and bread were the two categories

in which you had to be damn good

in order to win,

because the sorority of cooking women from

East Texas had those categories nailed.

Now. . . .

the admissions.

I had never made cream puffs from scratch

before the contest and I don't think I've made them since.

(I made a from-scratch French vanilla custard filling

and topped them with sifted powdered sugar).

And for those of you who are wondering

what I would have done if they hadn't been

 all tender and puffy and creamy delicious,

well. . .

I would have been licking a wooden spoon

for a long time and I wouldn't have gone to the Fair that day.

I've lost my recipe for the drop cookies.

They were a very delicate cookie made mostly

from shortening and sugar

with orange extract for flavoring.

They were very thin and you had to make sure

you kept a close eye on them

and snatched them out of the oven

just before the edges started to brown

so they were a lovely pale whitish color all over.

I don't have the recipe for the potato salad either.

It's one of those "a little bit of this and a lot of that"

recipes that require a lot of tasting and adjusting

and then I scribbled the "recipe" down

per contest entry requirements.

Now I laughingly say

I only cook for ribbons.

And since I've bored the snot out of you

telling you this long rambling story

about one thing

that is little known about me,

there's not room for the other six.

I'll save them for another post.