Kitchen Showdown

Sonya Goergen takes on national cooking contests

BY AMANDA PETERSON >> JILL OCKHARDT

With a busy life as a full-time marketing professional, wife and mother of two, you might expect Sonya Goergen to pop in a movie or grab a good book when she has a few rare minutes to relax. Instead, you’ll find this 36-year-old Moorhead woman firing up her grill and dicing veggies, with notes of recipe ideas scattered around her.

“Creating recipes is an outlet for me. It’s something I think about in my down time,” she says. “Just this morning I saw a picture that sparked an idea and I wrote it down. I carry a notebook of ideas and have sticky notes inside my kitchen cupboards. You never know where creativity will strike.”

It apparently strikes often.

Goergen’s recipes are taking her all over the country and bringing home thousands of dollars in prizes. Since 2007, she has submitted her original recipes to four or five national cooking contests each year – and won or placed as a finalist in most of them. Her winnings include more than $30,000 in cash prizes, six trips, kitchen appliances, cookware, a year’s supply of cheese and fish, gift cards and competition on a Food Network TV show.

Her latest success, the Pillsbury Bake-Off, was years in the making. Held every other year, PBO (as the contestants call it) is the pinnacle of cooking contests. Besides being the longest running, it carries the greatest prize - $1 million. Goergen has had her eyes on at least making it to the finals since she started entering contests.

“I always get a little crazy around Pillsbury Bake-Off contest entering time,” she says. “This year was different because they had three entrance periods with different themes, so I was crazy longer. All I could think about for months was how to use a Pillsbury product to create a recipe.”

The contest recipes could only take 30 minutes in the kitchen and use seven ingredients, including one Pillsbury product and another sponsor ingredient. Goergen eventually entered several recipes, including a lemonbasil chicken dish using Pillsbury lemon frosting. “It sounds disgusting, but it tasted great,” she says.

But it was a different recipe, Mini Italian Shepherd’s Pies, that earned her a trip to Las Vegas earlier this month as one of 100 finalists for a three-day bake-off. It was a dream come true.

“Just getting to participate in the contest was an experience,” says Goergen, who traveled with her husband, Troy. “They pulled out the Pillsbury blue carpet with formal dinners, photographs, a grand march and awards ceremony.”

2013 Pillsbury Bake-Off: Mini Italian Shepherd’s Pies

Recipe by Sonya Goergen

Ingredients

1 box (9 oz) frozen chopped spinach

1 lb extra lean (min. of 90%) ground beef

½ cup finely chopped onion

1 cup marinara sauce

1 box Pillsbury® refrigerated pie crusts, softened as directed on box

1 package (24 oz) refrigerated mashed potatoes (about 2 ½ cups)

2/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 400°F. Spray 36 mini muffin cups with Non-Stick Cooking Spray. Microwave frozen spinach as directed on box 3 to 4 minutes to thaw. Squeeze dry with paper towels.

2. In 12-inch nonstick skillet, cook ground beef over mediumhigh heat until no longer pink, stirring to break up large pieces. Stir in onion. Cook 3 to 4 minutes or until tender; drain. Stir in marinara sauce and half of the spinach.

3. Meanwhile, unroll pie crusts. Using 2 ¼-inch round cookie cutter, cut 18 rounds from each crust, rerolling dough if necessary. Press each round in bottom and up side of muffin cup. Spoon rounded tablespoon meat mixture in each cup.

4. Microwave mashed potatoes as directed on package 2 to 3 minutes or until warm. In medium bowl, mix potatoes, remaining spinach, cheese, ¼ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper until well blended. Top each cup with rounded tablespoon potato mixture.

5. Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until potatoes are golden brown. Cool in pans 2 minutes. Run knife around edge of cups to loosen. Serve warm.

Getting Started

Goergen’s cooking contest hobby started off with a bang in 2007. She was a finalist in the very first one she entered – the National Chicken Cooking Contest. Her Mustard Chicken with Roasted Dill Potatoes garnered a free trip to Birmingham, Ala., where she competed in a national cook-off for $100,000. Though she didn’t win, she came away with dozens of cooking contest connections, cook-off experience and the inspiration to try again.

The following year, Goergen’s Adobo Quesadilla Burgers were chosen by the popular Food Network as a finalist for the Ultimate Recipe Showdown in New York, hosted by chef Guy Fieri. Only four competitors were chosen from about 10,000 entries. Goergen was thrilled.

“How many people will ever get to do that?” she asks.

In 2012, she won $10,000 for her Peanutty Chicken Pad Thai Sliders in the Jif New Classics Contest. Combining one of her husband’s favorite foods (pad Thai) and popular sliders, she created a dish Jif officials couldn’t resist.

Later that year, she made it to the second round at the World Food Championships, hosted by Food Network’s Adam Richman. She cooked Chilean sea bass on a bed of vegetable quinoa with blistered grape tomatoes – all prepared outside on a camp stove on the Las Vegas strip. Goergen won $2,000 in the second round. The grand prize in the third round was $50,000 and was awarded to a chef from the Paris Hotel.

Whether on TV or live at cooking shows, the contests have brought out Goergen’s other strengths. She’s comfortable on camera, cooking under pressure and making last-minute changes. In 2009, Goergen hauled her great-grandmother’s cast iron skillet through airport security to cook with it as required in one contest, only to find out it predated the days when Lodge (a sponsor) started marking their cookware. She had to buy a new marked Lodge skillet and give it her best shot. She won the 2009 National Cornbread Cooking Contest.

Though she rarely eats meat and can’t eat gluten, Goergen cooks with those ingredients for her family and for contests. Troy and their children, Olivia, 5, and Gabriel, 2, are happy to taste-test.

“If I know a deadline is coming up, I cook a bunch of recipes in one shot and they test them,” she says. “Recently, it got to a point where Olivia would ask me if she could eat something or if I had to take a picture of it first for a contest. We are raising foodies!”

Sometimes Goergen doesn’t even technically “make” her own recipes before entering them in contest. She just knows how ingredients will work together and writes up a recipe.

“Some people can play music by ear. My wife can do the same thing with food,” Troy says. “She can taste a sauce at a restaurant, come home and re-create it.”

Troy, a strict recipe follower, says Goergen truly just tosses things together in the kitchen, without looking at any recipe, either her own or anyone else’s. For contests, it’s a huge help since she won’t accidentally mimic someone else’s recipe. At home, it creates some playful banter.

“He can cook great food by himself, but I just take over,” Goergen laughs.

“I hate it,” Troy says, smiling. “I like instructions.”

A Family Affair

Goergen’s interest and talents in the kitchen date back to her toddler days. Her mother, Bev Nelson of Hitterdal, Minn., has wonderful memories of watching tiny Goergen teetering on a chair in the kitchen, cooking with her father, Duane.

“He was an excellent cook and a good teacher,” Nelson says. “He helped her gain her experience and her confidence. That’s a big part of cooking, just knowing that you can do it.”

Through the years, Duane passed on his knack for understanding how foods work together, rarely using a recipe or measuring his ingredients. By age three, Goergen knew how to boil pasta and by age eight she was making dinners for her entire family.

Her two sisters and three brothers learned in much the same way.

“Our dad was a natural in the kitchen,” says Goergen’s sister Krista Dauner of Hawley, Minn. “We picked up our skills, from making a good pot roast to frying donuts, from our dad.”

When Duane was diagnosed with cancer in 2001, the whole family rallied around him – in the kitchen, of course.

“He lost a lot of weight due to chemo treatments,” Dauner says. “On Sundays, all of our siblings would get together for lunch to feed our dad. Sonya and our sister Barb tried to outdo each other.”

He passed away in 2002, before having a chance to meet Goergen’s own children – who now stand on stools in her kitchen and learn the same way she did. She hopes to carry on his love of food and passion for cooking.

“Both of my kids really like to be involved in the kitchen,” she says. “I think it’s why they’re such good eaters. They know the process of what we did to create something, just like I learned from my dad.”

Future Contests

Goergen’s goal for this year included three top contests – Pillsbury, the National Beef Cookoff and Sutter Home’s Build a Better Burger. She was named the regional finalist for the National Beef with her Grilled Steak and Artichoke Sandwich and made it to Pillsbury. She’s crossing her fingers to get to participate in Build a Better Burger.

Goergen says she’ll continue to enter cooking contests, hunting for ones each year that look the most fun and have prizes she’s interested in. It’s her mom’s turn to accompany her on a free cook-off trip and the prize money is building college savings accounts for her kids. But mostly, it’s just a fun, creative outlet for her talents.

“She’s very inventive and creative,” says Goergen’s sister Barb NelsonAgnew of Mahnomen, Minn. “I’m so proud of her for all she’s accomplished. She sets goals and does her best to meet her own high expectations. I look forward to seeing what she’ll do next. She’s full of surprises.” [AWM]

For Sonya’s contest results and delicous recipes, follow Area Woman on Facebook at facebook.com/areawomanmagazine or Twitter @AWFargo. Follow Goergen’s cooking adventures at her blog, thehautedish.com.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

- John 3:16