The Salsa Contest

May 22, 2010 by Ben

You may have seen the salsa I made the other day.  That was for a salsa contest I entered at a local festival in town.   It was The Wild West Fest and they had cowboys running around, a bull for the children to ride, ponies and the whole deal.  The salsa contest sounded fun so I joined.

The festival was a lot of fun and the salsa competition was a blast.   Everyone was so nice and we had so much fun.

Here is my salsa area.   Notice the Americana motif.  Splurged a little at the dollar store for those.

Here is my salsa and the samples out for everyone to take.  Everyone seemed to like it.

The local Mexican restaurants also donated their salsa’s to the event.

They had a very cute bluegrass trio.  They played some great tunes and were a lot of fun.

Cowboy walking through

They also put on shows during the festival with big gun shootouts.

The event was at the Leo Carrillo park and it was a lot of fun.  I had never been there before or even knew it existed.

And for some reason this park had wild peacocks running all over

These are weird and beautiful looking birds and they were everywhere!

Alas, even with my determined face, I did not win the salsa competition, but many many people came back and said they really liked my salsa and that was all I needed to hear.

Here are some things I learned about a salsa competition:

1. Don’t put “fire” in the name of your salsa.  It scares people away.  Mine was spicy, but not crazy hot
2. Go before the guy who has the hottest salsa ever made.  Basically he liquefied some crazy Indian peppers that are 10 times hotter than a habanero pepper.  You want to go before that guy.  If you go after that guy, everyone can’t taste anything and they are still crying from the pain.
3. They are a lot of fun.  I’m totally going to do this again.

Ben…