Du Jour: Aline Landry, winner of 9 Chefs

Last month, WAFB aired its 9 Chefs cooking competition, in which die-hard home chefs from Baton Rouge vied for top honors with personal recipes cooked on site. Winner Aline Landry says landing first place was a thrill, and was the culmination of a lifelong love for cooking that started in childhood. “I love good food, and I think it goes back to growing up on rice and cattle farm. My mother put me in charge of the kitchen, and I cooked from a very early age.” Landry joined 4-H in middle and high school, won a parish competition for her homemade bread and was poised to come to Baton Rouge for a statewide meet. Illness thwarted her attendance, but after decades of cooking and enjoying food, she entered another ring: WAFB’s inaugural edition of its special, 9 Chefs. Landry’s bruschetta and wonton ravioli edged out finalists in two rounds for a prize package that included a five-burner Wolf gas range, a knife set and cooking classes at the Louisiana Culinary Institute (LCI), pots and pans and a $500 spree at Central’s Oak Point Fresh Market. Along the way, the affable retired state worker says she never felt nervous about cooking for TV under time constraints. “I knew my recipes, and I told the others, ‘let’s just have fun with this. Did you ever imagine we’d get this far? It’s just great to be here,’” Landry recalls.

The nine finalists emerged from around 600 original applications that were narrowed to 68, then 17. Those 17 competitors were invited to bring a dish to showcase their abilities. Landry featured an original recipe for grilled chicken over pasta topped with citrus tomato sauce that had also been accepted into a Mary Engelbreit cookbook. For the 9 Chefs competition, which took place at LCI, she modified favorite recipes from Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten, and from Cooking Light. “I’d love to have dinner at ‘the Barefoot’s,’” she muses. Meanwhile, Landry is a passionate recipe collector and Food Network fan, and she spends a good chunk of the day cooking for friends and her husband, Don. Advice from the winner? “You can’t have too much garlic in something, I don’t think.”