Cooking and food show whips up a tasty response

Sitting in the very front row of the LaSells Stewart Center on Thursday night, Marcy McOwen and her friend Lorraine Barnett, both of Albany, sat looking eagerly at the stage, waiting for the show to start.

For the second straight year, the women had come to the Taste of Home Cooking School to enjoy free samples, compete for prizes donated by local businesses and — best of all — to watch Taste of Home representatives whip up recipes that they could take home and replicate for their families.

“It’s fun to go around and get all the samples and try new things,” McOwen said. “I’m looking forward to the demonstration.”

Both women use Taste of Home cookbooks and pull ideas from the company’s magazines as well.

“There’s a recipe for crème brulee that is out of this world,” McOwen raved.

“We had a ball last year,” Barnett said, which is exactly why they arrived at 3 p.m., three hours before the demonstration started, to get the best seats in the house.

Clad in a Taste of Home apron, Kristi Larson stood on the stage and tested her microphone as she prepared to whip up a little enthusiasm among an estimated 1,200 audience members eagerly awaiting a cooking lesson. Larson, the culinary specialist hosting Thursday night’s event, first got interested in Taste of Home when her mother subscribed to their magazine while she was in high school.

After graduating from Brigham Young University with a degree in family and consumer science education, she was excited by the opportunity to work for the organization that had created one of her favorite magazines.

For the last two years, she’s been hosting Taste of Home cooking schools around the country. Her “Swing into Spring” presentation included a lot of fresh-for-spring recipes and cooking hints and tips for simple approaches to meal preparation.

“That’s what we’re all about — down-home cooking,” she said. “It’s basic, but fun.”

Larson believes home cooking is seeing a resurgence.

“Especially with the economy, it gets expensive to eat out,” Larson said. And when you cook at home, she said, you know exactly what’s going into your food.

That’s important to Chris Marston and his wife, Aileen, who came from Albany to participate in the Taste of Home event. Chris Marston does most of the cooking in the house, and Aileen does the cleanup.

“I started getting the (Taste of Home) magazine in the late 1980s,” Chris said.

He said he likes the recipes because they are made from scratch, rather than requiring a lot of prepared ingredients. Aileen heads straight for dessert recipes, and recalls a nectarine buckle from last year — a pastry that was a cross between a cobbler and a crisp. She still dreams about it.

“It was super-super good,” she said, her eyes gleaming. “It was really buttery and the fruits were so fresh.”

Larson said her audiences are about 98 percent women. This seemed to hold true for the Corvallis event, but Chris didn’t mind.

“He’s the one that wanted to come,” Aileen said. And there was at least one advantage, as far as Chris could see:

“There’s no line for the bathroom.”

Taste of Home Cooking School was presented by Ray’s Food Place, the Corvallis Gazette-Times, the Albany Democrat-Herald and the Lebanon Express.

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