Lexington, KY - After living in Kentucky for three years, Brigitte Nguyen had never been to the Kentucky Derby. Last year, she and her fiancÈ were finally ready to go for it.
"It was the year we really wanted to go," said Nguyen, a California native who now calls Lexington home. As May was approaching, however, she got a phone call that put a halt to those plans - a recipe she had submitted had qualified her to attend the National Chicken Cooking Contest, the country's longest-running recipe competition. Nguyen and her fiancÈ, along with eight other contestants, were invited to fly to San Antonio for the cook-off, which took place the first weekend of May.
"I said, 'Well, the odds of me winning at the chicken cook-off are better than me winning the Derby,'" said Nguyen, 29. As it turns out, that hunch was right - her Chinese Chicken Burgers ended up taking first place, a $50,000 cash prize.
The contest was just one notch in a budding career in food competition for Nguyen, who has been flown to Napa Valley and New York City for various cooking competitions since she left her job at financial giant Deloitte and Touche after three years of working as a CPA. And though she missed the Derby last year, Nguyen has also traveled to the Olympics twice (Beijing and Vancouver) with a New York-based company that caters meals for the U.S. Olympic committee, corporate sponsors, media, athletes, trainers and their families.
Nguyen said she has been obsessed with food her entire life ("During high school, me and my girlfriends weren't at keg parties -
we were at each others' houses baking cupcakes," she said). She even worked part-time in the kitchen of a campus dining facility throughout college. But it took a few years of working in the corporate world to realize that those experiences may have been more formative and meaningful to her future than her actual degree.
"(My job at Deloitte and Touche) was kind of at the split point where it was like, 'Do you stay with us or do you go elsewhere?'" said Nguyen, a Claremont McKenna accounting/Spanish Literature double major. The job wasn't completely sour, she said, but the details that really stand out in her mind are quite revealing. "There was wonderful travel involved; we had great company meals. That's the funny thing - I can't tell you anything about the work I did, but I can tell you every good meal that I ate."
One of the first steps in exploring new career options involved a new regimen of "stalking the Food Network Web site," as she laughingly referred to it - submitting entries any time they announced an opening for a TV show or competition that she was eligible for. This month, Nguyen will appear on the Food Network for the second time, as a contender in the third season of the "Ultimate Recipe Showdown." Each season, the show features 24 home chefs from across the country, pitting four of them against each other in a different-themed episode each week for a chance to win $25,000. Nguyen also appeared on the show's second season, where she and her Vietnamese Bistro Burger lost by one point in the final round.
"The recipes that draw upon the stuff that I ate growing up seem to be the ones that end up doing really well," said Nguyen, who is of Vietnamese descent. "Growing up in California in an Asian household, we ate a lot of healthy, clean, Asian food - vegetable heavy and really fresh."
Nguyen recalls following her mom around the grocery store and farmer's market every weekend as she collected ingredients for the Vietnamese family-style meals, which typically included stir fried rice, steamed fish, fresh vegetables and a brothy soup. Needless to say, moving to Kentucky from the West Coast opened Nguyen's eyes to a new culinary world: the world of comfort food, which included such previously-foreign dishes as the Hot Brown and chicken-and-dumplings.
"Coming out here was when I realized there was more than one type of gravy," Nguyen laughed. "I had only seen turkey gravy at Thanksgiving. I was like, 'What's sausage gravy? What's red eye gravy? What's brown gravy?'"
A 2008 graduate of Sullivan University's culinary program, Nguyen has worked in a handful of kitchens in the region, including Holly Hill Inn and Idle Hour Country Club (she also bakes the cookies, brownies, macaroons and other delectable treats for Wine + Market). So she has had plenty of exposure to what she refers to as an "undiscovered world" of Southern traditions, and has eagerly incorporated many of these elements into her repertoire of recipes. In this season's "Ultimate Recipe Showdown," Nguyen will represent the Bluegrass in the Hometown Favorites episode, presenting a Hot Brown and a Bluegrass Burger alongside three other Southern contenders who hail from Texas, Florida and Mississippi.
"They were saying that I was the impostor Southerner," Nguyen said of her fellow contestants, "because not only is Kentucky not 'really' the South, but I'm from California."
Whether Nguyen's "Southerness" will pass the test remains to be seen - for viewers, that is. The season was filmed in September, so all of the contestants already know the outcome.
"We're just not allowed to talk about it," said Nguyen, with a mysterious look in her eye.
Watch Nguyen represent the Bluegrass on the Food Network's "Ultimate Recipe Showdown," at 9 p.m. April 18.
You can also watch Nguyen each Tuesday on WLEX 18's Wellness Cooking segment on the 12:30 p.m. news. During each segment, sponsored by Good Foods Co-Op, Nguyen makes over a favorite dish by adding a healthy twist.