Texas Steak Cookoff 2010

We have long enjoyed Big Terry's (Shane's stepdad) steaks. He makes one of the best steaks I have ever had. In fact, we don't even need to go to a fancy steak place, we just head over there and enjoy a steak and the pool. We are big fans of the Food Network, and last summer they aired one of their Challenge programs that just happened to be the Texas Steak Cookoff in Hico, TX. We watched the program, everything looked fun and delicious, and Shane had the idea to partner with the rest of the siblings and enter Big Terry into the competition as a Christmas present. None of us had ever been to this event in real life, or any other event like it, for that matter, but we decided to jump in with both feet.

For the competition, they had eighty teams enter and everyone was given two steaks after the cooks meeting first thing in the morning. Then, everyone had two hours before the first round of steaks had to be turned in to be judged. The steaks could be marinated or treated to the cooks' delight. After the first round of judging, the top thirty teams were chosen to advance to the final round of judging. Those teams were given two steaks again, and twenty minutes to prepare and present their meat. Then the top ten places were announced. There was also an appetizer competition that we entered as well.

The public is, of course, encouraged to attend and there were booths and live music as well as a wine tasting and obviously, a steak dinner. Only a select few of the contestants were invited to cook for the public. Some were chosen because of their past performance at the cookoff and some were chosen from a lottery. We just happened to be one of the chosen from the lottery.

Most of the teams arrived the night before to set up their area. Because of bad weather, we didn't arrive until the morning of and we were a little nervous.

We came prepared with coolers, chairs, extension cords and what we hoped, was everything else that we needed.

This was our set up. You can see from the sky that it was threatening rain all day.

Here is our little niece, Kailynn. She was holding the cord for us.

After we got our area set up, we were just kind of waiting to see what would happen next. The other contestants around us had really elaborate tables set up with all kinds of produce and pretty garnishes and decorations. We just had a couple of tables with nothing on them. We felt a little inadequate. Soon after, the other contestants started cooking food for all of the public that were wandering around and handing out samples. We had no idea that this was going to happen. We had brought food for our little group that we were planning to eat for lunch, but nothing else. As we were watching all of these people get goodies and treats from all the other tables, our competitive nature took over and we started dragging out everything that we had brought and cooking it.

Shane cooked up a batch of these jalapeno "poppers" that we entered for the appetizer competition. We set out a few of those and within minutes they were completely demolished. For one brief second, we had a line like the other tables, and that feeling of having something that everyone wanted was very addictive and we spent the next little bit churning out food as fast as we could go. We were not at all prepared to share our food and Shane said that it was a little like Jesus feeding the five thousand, but with no Jesus. I had brought enough corn for our whole group and we started shucking corn and throwing it on the grill. Then, we cut it in small pieces so that it would last a little longer. We also had avocados for guacamole and one bag of chips. We fixed the guac and then spooned a little bit onto each chip. Shane cooked up the rest of the sausage links that we had and cut those up and set them out. It was a meager offering, but was very well received.

Little Terry and Shane were hard at work fixing the rest of those poppers.

Shane, Eric and Little Terry

This was a view of people on the street.

Here is our little stand. I should have taken pictures of some of the other contestants, so that you could see how sad our little stand was.

My brother and sister-in-law, Eric and Betty.

Of course, Shane.

Big Terry was hard at work cooking the steak entry while Shane was cooking sausages.



Here was the steak that went to the judges.

Right before they took off to deliver it.
After the steak was entered, we had some down time waiting for the first awards announcements. We ended up not making it to the top thirty, but it was fun. After the announcement, the public started showing up waiting for dinner. Some of the more well known contestants around us had a line started beside their tables an hour before we even got the steaks to cook for them. That was a little deflating, but we developed our own little following from earlier that morning and we had people coming back to us because they liked our food.

Here was our line. We ended up cooking about thirty steaks.

They would come through the line and Betty and Jaimi would collect their ticket for dinner and then pass on the number to us in the back. We would set out the order and start seasoning the meat to go on the grill.

Shane was in charge of finding out how everyone wanted their meat cooked and then helping Big Terry keep track of what was what on the grill.

We had a lot of fun, but thank goodness we only cooked thirty, because I don't know that we could have handled many more than that.





All in all, it was a fantastic weekend, and we all had a blast!