Last September Scott from Anchor Books, a division of Random House, sent me an email to see if I was willing to run some kind of contest wherein the winner would win a copy of Kate Christensen’s Novel, “The Epicure’s Lament”. He was to send me a copy to peruse to see if it was something worth my time. Scott gave me at least 5 months to read the book and get the ball rolling, what the heck eh? Time passed and I chewed my way through the book without much grief, what with all those high-fulloutin’ words and all. The idea of having a meat photo contest with judges seemed like a natural choice for Meathenge Labs, you bet.
Before I knew it, the end of January showed up and it was time to start.
And now it’s all over and time to announce the winners!

p.s. Photograph includes: Country Style Pork Ribs marinated 24 hours in homemade chile sauce, chicken halves marinated 2 hours in fresh lemon juice and spicy spice, fresh made Italian mild & hot sausages, bright & hot marinated with herbs beef tri-tip roast. All smoked for more than 2.5 hours with real hickory wood.
Surely you’ve been checking out the contest entries from time to time. Everyone who participated blew me away with the effort & time they put in to their submissions. They took it seriously and clearly had a lot of fun at the same time. Give yourselves a hand, you deserve it.
I chose February 6th to have a meat party and decide who the 3 winners might be, made sense. A week and a half to allow people time to do what they needed to seemed fair enough. Yeah well, turns out the Super Bowl was on the 6th as well. You think YOU had a long day on Sunday? HA !!! Vitamin B & Aspirin at noon proved to be an excellent choice.
People started arriving around 1:30 and by 2:30 we were all perched around my little laptop with pencils & paper ready (yes, we own pencils). I decided NOT to judge, I’m way too biased and knew about the posts on your blogs. Plus I wanted everyone to win, not good judge material.
I gave the rundown on the rules & points of judgement, such as, 1. Composition, 2. Meatyness, 3. Love. Paul mentioned it would be nice to READ aloud all the descriptive paragraphs while the images were viewed. We were OFF !!!
For the next however long we were taking turns reading and checking out the glistenny love. Deb’s sausages drew people right in as I read her description, we went back several times just to see. Kitchen Monkey’s Meat Platter took us a while because we all read what was what and where it might be placed, bacon wrapped this and pork that. Darned impressive spread there bucko. Jenn (that’s The Honorable Judge Jenn) knows vegetables and pointed out some neat vegetable related items, thanks Jenn! Nic from Baking Sheet pulled a sucker punch with the Meat Loaf entry, several judges just made low gutteral warmy noises. Meg reigned in with The Best Pork Ever. Meathead dubbed it The Blair Meat Project, cool. Both Mrs. Meathead and I pointed at Sam’s Meat Art entry, we have the same print up on our walls! YEAH !!! Charlotte decided on a meatball chicken soup, that rates HIGH on the love scale right there pally boy. Yumbo! Karen submitted a pretty Blanquinegro Pork Stew for us to sample. My favorite part was the little lime in the sour cream. Hooyah! A little late and not lacking in content was Debra with her skinning of the boar by two vegetarians. “Humane meat carvers, that’s Love,” stated Meathead. And that, was that. I collected the sheets while polishing off a cool freshin’. Only glancing, I noticed many used decimals. Eeek, I’ll have to really pay attention when I tally everything up. That’ll give me something to do at work on Monday.
Drumroll please!
Deb from In My Kitchen came in first. She was only .9 points over Meg at IHeartBacon who came in second. 3rd place was the battle royale between Kitchen Monkey and Nic from Baking Sheet. Nic squeezed in over KM by .6 of a point. It was .6 of Love that did it for this entry.
And that right there gives us our 3 winners for the Meat Platter Contest.
I would like to make an honorable mention to Gastronomie who put in a valiant effort just a tad too late. Here is her entry: In honor of Dr. Biggles
Thank you!
And that, is that. Thank you all for a great few weeks and hopefully some day soon we can do it again.
Xo Xo