Posted by Statesman Journal, OR on November 03, 2008 at 07:08:39:
Columnist Capi Lynn
Rachael Ray
Local mom is finalist in Rachael Ray showdown
November 3, 2008
Nap time in the Evenson household is just before 3 p.m. weekdays. Little Josephine, Georgia and Bjorn usually cooperate, giving mom Lindsey a chance for some RR.
Never mind rest and relaxation. She needs her daily dose of Rachael Ray, the perky celebrity chef and multimedia mogul who has an Emmy award-winning talk show.
"I'll sit there and think about what I'm going to make for dinner," Evenson said. "She cooks in a way where you don't need to be sitting there with notepad and pen, taking down a recipe.
"You can kind of just get the general idea of what she's doing and then go off that for inspiration and do what she did or twist on it. I just like her style."
Evenson is a huge fan, and now is in position to get even more inspiration.
The stay-at-home mom from Salem is one of five finalists in Ray's "Hey, Can You Cook?! 3" competition.
Tune in to the "Rachael Ray" show this afternoon on KGW Channel 8 to see how Evenson fares in the first week of the culinary competition. Each Monday in November the finalists will take on a new challenge, with one cook being eliminated and the rest moving on to the next round. The winner will be announced during the Nov. 24 show.
Evenson, 26, will be mixing it up with two other women and two men.
The show is taped, so obviously Evenson, the contestants and everyone involved with the show know who advances, and who gets eliminated.
When I contacted Evenson to set up an interview last week, she seemed a bit wary, and understandably so.
"I signed so many papers, I'm afraid to say the wrong thing," she said.
Show reps are nervous, too, so nervous that they arranged a conference call so they could listen in while I chatted with Evenson about everything from her family to her cooking background.
"There's a lot of secrecy," said the show's Hallie Goldfarb, who monitored the call from New York, where the show is taped.
There were a couple of times during the conversation when Evenson asked, "Can I say that?"
"I don't think so," Goldfarb responded.
Evenson and the other finalists were chosen from among thousands of budding cooks who sent in audition tapes demonstrating their cooking skills, creativity and personality.
Her tape included footage of her in the garden with her children: daughters Josephine, 4, and Georgia, 2; and son Bjorn, 6 months.
"We do a lot of cooking out of the garden," Evenson said.
She prepared a meal for the tape that included two types of salmon that she caught in her home state of Alaska — one with citrus and the other with dill — and a salad with fresh raw green beans and spinach from their garden, and blueberries from bushes in their yard.
"I was just basically saying things that grow together tend to go together," Evenson said.
She also baked eggs in a muffin tin and for dessert, broiled peaches with balsamic vinegar.
"I kind of went overboard on all the things I was making, and that's probably why it ended up being 20 minutes," she said. "But whatever, you get one chance to send in a video, so I figured I'd better hit all the bases.
"I was thinking, 'Oh, this is ridiculously long, they're never going to watch the whole thing.' "
The show's production team must have liked what it saw, because Evenson received a call about a week later and was told the show would be sending a film crew out to see if she was "telegenic." The crew was filming at her house Oct. 7, when Evenson got a surprise call informing her she was a finalist and that she needed to pack her bags for Florida, where the first challenge would be held.
"That was a call from the actual Rachael Ray," Evenson said. "Not the show, from HER!"
Evenson was so excited that she screamed into the phone, prompting this response from Ray: "Oh, I didn't need that ear."
This is the third edition of the "Hey, Can You Cook?!" contest, which has a reality-show flair. The competition should be fierce, with a posh prize package up for grabs.
The last cook standing wins a chef's kitchen facelift with professional Viking appliances and Silestone countertops, plus the opportunity to participate in a culinary training program at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. The winner also gets the opportunity to demonstrate his or her original recipe on the show with Rachael Ray as their sous chef.
"Some of the other reality shows can get mean and nasty, and they're torturing them and all this stuff," Evenson said. "But Rachael Ray couldn't torture anyone."
The first round takes place at the Walt Disney World Resort. The contestants face off in a foot race through the Magic Kingdom Park, where they must find hidden locations to prepare some of Disney's most popular snack foods.
"I felt like I kind of had a leg up there," said Evenson, who runs at least 3 miles a day, five days a week, and participated in marathons and half-marathons before she had her son.
The finalists then create a dish in the elimination challenge using fruits and vegetables harvested from greenhouses at Epcot.
Cooking is a passion for Evenson, who got married and had her first child while in college.
"We have always been on a budget," she said. "If you're on a budget you're kind of forced to cook, and you're kind of forced to cook from scratch. You don't get to buy the ready-made meals. I had to kind of be creative. Since I'm a stay-at-home mom, a lot of my day revolves around feeding my family."
Evenson has worked in the past as a freelancer for the Statesman Journal, contributing food-related stories. She also baked truffles and caramels out of her home for a time. Her husband, Ryan, works for US Bank.
Becoming a finalist for the cooking competition has been rewarding for Evenson, but at the same time difficult on her kids because of the travel factor. If she advances, they'll be seeing even less of their mom in the coming weeks.
"Maybe once they see me on TV they might be excited, but right now all they know is Mom's leaving," she said. "They're not thrilled about it at all."
Evenson is thrilled to get a chance to send a message to other moms: "I love that I can be on this competition and show that you can cook family-friendly, kid-friendly food, and you can do it quickly and really healthfully."
FOLLOW UP POSTS ARE NOT PERMITTED - DO NOT COMPLETE & SUBMIT FORM