__elizabeth Zemelko Recipes

__LEONARD (LEN) THOMPSON

Steps:

• Challenges are as certain in life as love and taxes. "1 like challenges," says Leonard Thompson. Len remembers childhood baking, using a temperamental gasoline stove. "You would have to tiptoe across the floor so the cake wouldn't fall." Len didn't get a chance to perfect his baking back then--the intervening years were dominated by the adventures of raising four children and navigating a successful career. But he always met the demands of making special time for family. "On weekends, usually on Sunday morning, it would be my pancake breakfast day, eggs, bacon, everything... the whole family uses my pancake recipe now."Since I retired I've gotten back into baking," Len says. The challenges had waited for him. For Thanksgiving he started a pecan pie, "but I made one little mistake, using a pan with holes in the bottom. Everything turned out fine-except there was a black cloud of smoke pouring out of the oven. Half the filling leaked out. And we were supposed to go to Thanksgiving dinner that day! My wife suggested I put chocolate pudding in there, so I did, topped it off with a little whipped cream, and named it 'Disaster Pie.' People really liked it, so I improved it ... My wife suggested that I enter it in the Bake-Off® Contest. I only sent in one entry, and lo and behold..." Chocolate Silk Pecan Pie was on its way to becoming a Pillsbury classic.Len considers his journey to the Bake-Off® Contest to have been as rewarding as the outcome. "Getting to the Bake-Off® Contest is a challenge, and if you like challenges, it's a tremendous one, and I do like challenges."From "Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook." Copyright 2004 General Mills. Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

__ANNETTE ERBECK

Steps:

• There's wisdom in trying the different paths that life sets out before us. "I was born and raised in New York City, but now thoroughly enjoy living on a sixty-acre farm in a small town," Annette Erbeck says. "We raise, process and freeze our own beef, and raise and can many vegetables." She hasn't changed herself unrecognizably though, says Annette. "I plead incompetence when it comes to operating tractors, preferring the kitchen." And there's wisdom in knowing your limits, too.From "Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook." Copyright 2004 General Mills. Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

__ELLEN BURR

Steps:

• So much of American cooking has international roots, but a sense of what the cooking of indigenous Americans was like can be gleaned from Cape Cod resident Ellen Burr's harvest. "I love to gather wild edibles: bolete mushrooms, dandelion greens, sassafras leaves (to dry for file powder for gumbo). I pick lots of berries--blueberries, strawberries, shad berries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, cranberries, elderberries, rosehips, rum cherries, and English blueberries--for desserts, for freezing, for preserves, and for jellies. I also dig clams, gather oysters and mussels, go crabbing and fish for trout and perch." Although Ellen has devoted so much of her keen attention to native foods, she also turns to foods with an international heritage for inspiration, and comes up with hits like her Dotted Swiss and Spinach Quiche.From "Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook." Copyright 2004 General Mills. Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

__ELIZABETH ZEMELKO

Steps:

• Cooking for a large family is one of the most absorbing and challenging kinds of work, and Elizabeth Zemelko has been involved with food and cooking from an early age. "I grew up in a Slovak-speaking home, with Ma, Pa, ten kids, and three boarders. We ate in three shifts: those who worked, those who went to school, and then us little ones, with Ma, had the leftovers. What a beautiful survival, now that I look back on everything. Once Ma said to me, 'I can't believe how much these hands have done in work.'" When the work is raising and feeding a family, it is a labor of love and the rewards are profound.From "Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook." Copyright 2004 General Mills. Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.