JULI LEONARD - jleonard@newsobserver.com
"Your wings are so good," whispers Mary Ann Fletcher, right, into Erin Snow's ear during the Super Bowl themed food contest at Burt's Bees in Durham. The company has monthly contests among co-workers to see who has the best recipes. Outsiders come in to judge the results.
Alanna Reynolds is sautéing bacon-wrapped shrimp with pineapple. Chris Mundt is assembling his "Bronco Bites" - baked wonton wrapper cups filled with bacon, chives and two cheeses. And Erin Snow is throwing chicken wings into a deep fryer and telling folks that the window to enjoy one at its peak is narrow: "Wings have only five minutes from fryer to face."
These three home cooks are battling for bragging rights in the monthly cooking contest at Burt's Bees corporate headquarters in downtown Durham. Usually, about a dozen employees battle for a plastic gold trophy that declares their chili, ice cream or dips as the best.
This contest is a Super Bowl throwdown with four categories: dips, finger foods, healthy and football-themed. The spread is impressive, and the winning recipes would be perfect for winter's other sports TV extravaganza, March Madness.
Finger foods and dips are the most popular entries. But the football category generates the most impressive presentation, a substantial bean dip called a "Mexican cheesecake" made to look like a football field with corn kernels for players and goal posts fashioned from celery sticks.
Snow explains that the contests began last year because a co-worker bragged about his key lime pie. Snow has often received compliments on her key lime pie and so challenged him to a bake-off. Snow won, thanks to her coconut-graham cracker crust, Mexican vanilla and real whipped cream.
For the next contest, Mandy Steinhardt, a food blogger who works in Burt's Bees marketing department, offered to take over as the organizer.
Steinhardt offers prizes beyond the plastic trophy: gift certificates, cooking classes and cookbooks. Instead of having employees as judges, Steinhardt recruits fellow food bloggers, cookbook authors and others in the Triangle's food scene. (For the Super Bowl contest, I was a judge along with Nick Hawthorne-Johnson, owner of The Durham Cookery, and Mike Hacker, chef of the Pie Pushers food truck.)
About Steinhardt's skill as an organizer, Snow says, "Mandy took it to a whole other level."
It's also clear how seriously Steinhardt's co-workers take these contests. Mundt, a regular winner, gets so nervous that he cannot watch the judging process. He goes back to his office to work while his co-workers enjoy the feast. (Mundt won the finger foods category, and Snow's chicken wings earned an honorable mention.)
Their co-worker, Tiffany Keyes, also reports getting nervous but continued her reign as dip champion with a delicious crab dip - a recipe she is keeping to herself. Beth Ritter's homemade pickles won the healthy category, and first-time contestant Reynolds' bacon-wrapped shrimp with pineapple took the overall prize.
With the trophy now displayed on her desk, Reynolds says the fierce competition made her wait to enter: "I figured if I was going to compete, I better bring my A game."
