A Top Chef

About a week before Alia Dalal was to compete as a finalist in Cooking Light’s Healthy Cook of the Year contest, she got a surprise email from the magazine. In addition to the Afghani-style squash recipe she was set to prepare, she’d have to make a second original dish—a lightened-up version of macaroni and cheese—for the final cook-off on October 23 in Atlanta.

She took a risk and ditched the mac.

“I figured there are a million mac and cheese recipes out there, so mine needed to stand out,” says Dalal (CAS’08), one of four finalists competing at the Taste of Atlanta food festival. “And I don’t do whole wheat pasta or low-fat cheese.” Instead, her recipe called for sautéed zucchini batons with cheese, roasted grape tomatoes, and a topping of puffed amaranth grain. “It’s still an indulgent dish, but more of a high-quality indulgence, hopefully,” she says.

The risk paid off. Dalal won the contest, along with a prize—a kitchen makeover and groceries for a year—valued at $10,000 and the opportunity to contribute to Cooking Light.

Allison Fishman, a Cooking Light chef and a contest judge, describes Dalal’s dishes as bold. “First, she took us traveling to Afghanistan, using interesting flavors,” Fishman says. “Then she left out the mac, but added lots of other goodies, to her mac and cheese.”

Dalal, 24, who works in public relations at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, says she’s thrilled with the win. “I knew that I was being pretty bold by omitting the pasta in macaroni and cheese, but I had an idea that I thought was good, and I needed to stick to it.”

Dalal wasn’t always a foodie, and didn’t have much experience in the kitchen until she moved into her first apartment at BU. But she did grow up with an appreciation of cuisines from around the world. As a child, she eagerly explored Chicago’s myriad ethnic family-owned restaurants with her Pakistani father and German-American mother.

“I don’t think you could say I’ve always been interested in food,” says Dalal. “But I’ve always been a good eater.”

Now a student in the chef’s training program at the Natural Gourmet Institute, in New York, Dalal spotted the casting call for the contest at school last spring. The contestants were required to submit a three-minute video of themselves preparing a healthy, original recipe. In her video, Dalal prepares Afghani-style squash with curried kale and apples in her Brooklyn kitchen.

The magazine editors, who assessed contestants’ culinary skills, entertainment value, and originality, narrowed the field to eight and posted their videos online for public voting, which ended on September 8. The next day, Dalal learned that she was among the finalists. The four, all women, then competed in the cook-off in Atlanta.

Dalal says she was anxious heading into the competition, but the intimate outdoor stage and an audience that included family members put her at ease. “Once I was on stage, cooking and talking, I was totally into it and not nervous,” she says.

At the food festival, the cooks had a few early morning hours to prep. Then they took the stage, two at a time, where they had 15 minutes to finish their first dish. “They supplied everything,” Dalal says. “But I brought my own knife, just in case. I knew I had to cut rock-hard squash, and I’m a little lady, so I wanted to make sure I’d have the tool to get the job done.”

The judges—Fishman, Atlanta-based chef Marvin Woods, and Good Day Atlanta coanchor Suchita Vadlamani—tasted the food, commented, and scored the dishes. The two top scorers then had 40 minutes to prepare their mac and cheese.

All went according to plan, but for one glitch in the final round: Dalal ran short on a key ingredient. “Cooking, especially with produce, is different every time,” she says. “I actually didn’t end up having enough zucchini for my macaroni and cheese. The organizers helped me track down an extra one that was in a decorative display on the stage.” (That wasn’t the biggest challenge, though, Dalal says. “Talking to an audience and cooking at the same time—harder than you think.”)

Dalal says she was shocked at the win, a reaction apparently shared by her family. “I looked into the audience and saw my mom’s jaw drop,” she recalls. “It was pretty cute.”

Dalal will finish school in January 2011. She has started doing cooking demonstrations at the Tompkins Square Greenmarket in Manhattan, and she will teach a class (Easy Indian) on January 6 at the Park Slope Food Coop.

But she has no firm plans yet, beyond an internship at a New York City restaurant. “I hope to do a mixture of things as I move forward,” she says, “writing recipes and writing about food, teaching, and maybe more demos or private cooking.”

And perhaps she’ll continue to savor her victory in Atlanta. “I got to feel like a mini-celebrity, being picked up in cars and having my photo taken,” she says. “Definitely worlds away from my typical day, which normally begins and ends with me squeezing into a packed L train.”

Watch a video about Cooking Light’s Healthy Cook of the Year Contest. Read what Cooking Light chef Allison Fishman wrote about the contest.

Cynthia K. Buccini can be reached at cbuccini@bu.edu.