Serves: 5
Total Calories: 529
Denise JoAnne Yennie says her cooking experiences got off to a rocky start. When she was nine, she made a tossed salad for her family. As she brought it to the table, she tripped and literally "tossed" the salad. To this day, Denise's mother also recalls a "Hawaiian" ham dish, lovingly prepared from a children's cookbook recipe, that 10-year-old Denise made in celebration of Mother's Day.
Denise confesses a lifelong passion for food, inspired by her mother, her aunts and her German grandmother, all good cooks. Still, to most of her acquaintances, Denise is known as a business consultant. Her consulting firm challenges clients' conventional wisdom in doing business, and Denise carries a bit of that renegade spirit into her cooking.
"Everything I do has to be quick and easy," the Nashville mother of two says. "My mom and grandmother used to cook things slowly, all day. Not me. I turn on the heat and crank it up." For the contest, "I wanted to create something special enough to get recognized," she says. And her recipe for Chicken Florentine Panini did just that. The Italian sandwich made with refrigerated pizza crust, garlic-flavored mayonnaise, sautéed chicken breasts, spinach and caramelized onions won the $1 million Grand Prize in the 2002 Pillsbury Bake-Off® Contest. The recipe's simple, convenient ingredients paired with sophisticated cooking techniques made it a standout.
Denise herself was described as a standout at the Bake-Off® Contest. Amid the soft whir of blenders, she turned heads as she used a mallet to noisily pound chicken breasts and an electric knife to cut her sandwiches into precise squares. "I pounded so much chicken that I have 'chicken-pounding elbow,'" she joked.
After her Bake-Off® victory, Denise made several television appearances. "I had to practice getting the preparation of the sandwich done in five minutes for the OPRAH show and in two minutes for the TODAY show," she says. "The publicity came in a whirlwind and left just as quickly as it happened," she says. "The best part has been the impact and effect on all the people who know me-how they go and tell their friends. They get to live this joy with me."
From "Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook." Copyright 2004 General Mills. Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This __Denise Joanne Yennie recipe is from the Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off® Cookbook Cookbook. Download this Cookbook today.
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