BY OWEN MORRIS
Lindsay Weiss of Overland Park is one of twelve finalists for Cooking Light's Ultimate Reader Recipe Contest. Cooking Light, which bills itself as the "world's largest food and healthy lifestyle magazine," chose Weiss' dessert recipe of roasted banana bars with browned butter pecan frosting.
If this sounds vaguely familiar that's because Cooking Light's sister magazine, Southern Living, chose Weiss as the winner of its sixth annual cook-off this past December for her original recipe, roasted banana ice cream with warm peanut butter sauce. "My family thinks it's so funny both recipes feature bananas ... we were a little worried the first recipe was a one-hit wonder," Weiss told me.
When I asked Weiss if these were family recipes, she started laughing and admitted that she hadn't even tried making the banana bars with browned butter pecan frosting until she submitted the recipe.
"I had never made the dish together. I loved my family's banana bars growing up and the recipe for them is basically the same, but the butter frosting was originally for an apple dessert ... the calories are in the frosting and I did have to change it to take out some of the butter and make it lighter, which I did with cake flour. I knew if I was going to use any butter I had to make it good and so that's where the idea of browning the butter came."
In addition to earning the respect of fellow cooks, doing well in these contests can be lucrative. For winning the Southern Living Cook-Off, Weiss collected a grand prize of $100,000. The grand prize for the Ultimate Reader Recipe Contest is $20,000. But Weiss says she's not bothered by pressure. "It's just for fun. Especially this time. Last year, my boy was only six weeks old when I was cooking for the judges ... I really love it as a hobby."
Weiss' advice to fellow recipe makers is simple: "Think differently. Take your favorite dish and make a twist of it and don't be afraid of messing up. For every good recipe I have, there's eight or nine bad ones."
Before getting involved with desserts, Weiss was a finalist in the Cooking Light contest last year in the entree category. Here she is talking about her recipe for pot stickers:
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