Mom was inspiration and first teacher in the kitchen
Bill Hicks fondly remembers learning to cook in his mom's kitchen alongside his younger brother, Brian.
Bill was only 5 when his mom let him decorate cookies. If something she was cooking needed to be stirred, he got the job.
On Nov. 2, cooking alongside his brother, the Carpentersville home cook used those skills his mom taught and won this year's Cook of the Week Challenge Finale. His dish was built around the four secret ingredients: monkfish, walnuts, Great Northern white beans and skhug sauce.
Brian came from Lansing, Michigan, to serve as Bill's sous chef. He acknowledged after Bill's win that the moment was bittersweet: Their mom died last month.
"She would have been ecstatic," Bill said. "I kept thinking … I wish she was still here."
The innovation Bill needed to win started as a boy in his mother's kitchen, where his desire to cook sometimes led to comical moments - like the time he added about a tablespoon of dried herbs and, for good measure, green food coloring to scrambled eggs for a cousin and himself.
"Neither one of us could even get a bite down," he said with a laugh. "They were awful."
His love of cooking culminated when his parents sent him and his brother to a weeklong cooking class taught by renowned chef and cookbook author Anne Willan.
"That forever changed how my brother and I looked at cooking," he said.
Shortly after, Bill created a cookbook featuring family recipes that he gave to family and friends. The book, he said, was dedicated to his mom.
"She was the inspiration for us," he said.
Bill said he has spent a lifetime cooking some high-end cuisine with family and friends. But he wanted to pit his skills against someone else and see how he would do in the Cook of the Week Challenge.
"I was really impressed with some of the product that other people came up with," he said. "It was really remarkable."
Bill recalls the first challenge as the most memorable. He used the required ingredients to prepare a prosciutto-and-pistachio-stuffed chicken breast with an orange Dijon mustard sauce, served with moonshine and cider-flavored sweet potatoes.
"It was just a bizarre basket," he recalled.
Bill credits his age, 70, and many years of experience as helping him navigate through the competition and the mystery ingredients.
"The most important thing in cooking is to learn a variety of techniques," he said. "You can always adapt the technique to various ingredients, but if you don't know the technique, the basic techniques, you are really lost."
A couple weeks before the finale, Bill said he and Brian met to discuss ingredients they might encounter.
Noting that fish was popular in previous finales, which made sense because it cooks quickly, Bill thought maybe he'd be faced with an unusual variety. So, he thumbed through fish cookbooks and noticed in one of his favorite cookbooks, Willan's "La Varenne Pratique," scallops of monkfish.
Bill also visited a local fishmonger. Noticing monkfish in the case, he asked for some tips on how to cook it.
"It was so strange that I had that experience and then I happened to stumble across this recipe in 'La Varenne,' " Bill said, then added, with a laugh. "Brian made the comment. He says, 'Yes, mom is probably up there saying to us, 'It's monkfish. It's monkfish.' "
But the ingredient that gave them the biggest challenge was the can of white Great Northern beans.
"By themselves, beans and fish don't strike me as going together all that well. So I knew I had to add other components to add some interest and also to add some color," he said.
His winning finale dish, monkfish medallions with cream skhug sauce atop a bed of peppers, mushrooms and beans, went on to wow the judges in taste and presentation.
Bill says he was surprised by his win.
"I was really impressed with what other folks put together," he said. "I feel very honored they selected my presentation."
Cooking for awhile for just himself and his wife, Bill said his cooking had become ordinary. The Cook of the Week Challenge has rekindled the creative juices.
"Looking over the classic cookbooks, that's basically how I prepared. I got my Julia Child, my 'La Varenne,' some I really cherish like 'The Sauce Bible,' which is just fabulous and comprehensive," he said. "By walking through those again and looking at the technique and the preparations they use, this has me inspired again."
Final Four recipes
See the recipes, here, from the final four contestants in the 2015 Cook of the Week Challenge.