Off Topic: Johnsonville Pastaville Italian Sausage Recipe Contest

Do you have a great pasta
To enter the contest, just go to Pastaville and submit your best recipe (or recipes). You can upload a couple pictures and a video as part of your submission to help make your recipe stand out. Once all submissions have been received, the top six recipes will be selected as finalists. They'll make the recipes, taste them, and judge them based on overall taste, visual appeal, and ease of preparation. First place will receive $10,000 while second and third place will receive $3,000 and $2,000, respectively.

If you need some inspiration, here's a simple recipe that I made the other day that uses only three or four ingredients.

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Off Topic: Amano Chocolate Contest

The only ingredients they use in the dark chocolate are cocoa beans, cane sugar, cocoa butter, and vanilla beans - all the different characteristics are brought out through their attention to the harvest, fermentation, roasting, and processing of the beans. In the end, the chocolate bar they produce is incredible - putting all other bars to shame. I love being able to pull out a couple of bars and have people taste the differences between the different bars with beans coming from different valleys and regions. The only downside is that a 2 ounce bar runs about $7 in stores when you can find it. (Because of how they source their cocoa and the seasonality of the crop, some Amano chocolate bars aren't available all the time.)

That's why this contest they are running is so cool. They are offering a year's supply of Amano Chocolate (actually, ten bars a month for a whole year) to one person who can guess the origin of their newest chocolate (which will be unveiled at the 56th Summer Fancy Food Show on June 27th). To help people guess where the cocoa is sourced from, they've provided this picture of the beans. Of the people who guess correctly, they will hold a drawing to see who the lucky person is.

View the original article here

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