Williamsburg woman wins IKEA recipe contest, will be featured in Oprah Magazine

Carol Powell with her husband Kenny and two sons Noble, left, and Brian, right.

A Williamsburg woman is one of three grand prize winners in a contest sponsored by international home furnishings giant IKEA to celebrate how food connects people.

Carol Powell said the recipe for “The Powell Family Homegrown Salsa” was concocted about a decade ago with ingredients grown in the family garden. What began as a solution to an overflowing crop of homegrown Roma tomatoes has resulted in a cherished recipe and family tradition – picking and dicing veggies and canning a deliciously fresh homegrown salsa, perfect for sharing at summertime get-togethers.

And the recipe earned her top honors in the “Social Summer — Picnics, Cookouts, Reunions & More” category of the contest.
Powell said she was sort of surprised when she got the email notification saying she’d won.

“I entered the recipe that my sons and I had put together and sort of forgot all about it,” Powell said.

“I’ve never really won anything. When I got that email, I just spent the whole day in complete shock.”

Powell will receive a trip for two to New York City for four days and nights for a photo shoot with O, The Oprah Magazine. The photos, a story about her prize-winning salsa recipe and the recipe itself will appear in the June edition of the magazine. She will also receive a $1,500 IKEA gift card and a “Dinner Party Kit” consisting of kitchen and food-related IKEA products.

Powell said the salsa recipe was conceived when she and her two sons, Noble and Brian, decided to do a little kitchen experimentation together about 10 years ago.

“The kids and I have always cooked together. We had all these tomatoes just rolling out of the garden that year so we decided to make salsa with it,” Powell said. “We researched it and found some recipes that we liked, but then we just sat down and got busy and came up with something on our own. We spent the whole day coming up with this wonderful salsa.”

The key, Powell said, is the delicious Roma tomatoes her husband, Kenny, lovingly grows in his home garden where they live in the Wofford community of Whitley County.

“His tomatoes are phenomenal. He really babies them,” Powell said.

The first batch they all made together … there was so much they decided to can some to have during the winter. Now they do it every year.

Powell said she was worried that IKEA would want to taste the salsa when she was announced as the winner, but that she wouldn’t have any left. Luckily, one jar remains to take to New York.

What she believes won the contest as much as anything is the special story that goes along with the creation of the salsa. In hindsight, she said the day she spent with her sons mixing ingredients and being creative was priceless.

“It really was amazing,” she said. “My sons and my husband, they are the love of my life. We’ve always done everything together. It was a really neat day.”

“We’ve gotten together plenty of times since then to make the salsa. We improve it a little every time we’ve made it. It’s really a simple recipe, but I think it’s usually those little simple pleasures of life that are the very best anyway.”

Powell said she is a regular reader of “O, The Oprah Magazine” and just happened to see an advertisement for the contest in it one night when she couldn’t sleep. She said she never enters contests usually, but that this one caught her attention, and she felt the salsa recipe was a perfect fit.

Turns out, she was right.

“These and the thousands of other wonderful stories we read really exemplify the idea that there is so much more to food than food,” said Lisa Hajra, Together, We Eat Project Leader for IKEA. “Having shared just a few examples of treasured family food moments, we hope to inspire people to create more food-related memories together in what we often refer to as the heart of the home – the kitchen.”

Powell said she comes from a “long line” of family members that tended their own home gardens and created family recipes. She’s put together a 150-page recipe book of her own that focuses on her family stories and features favorite recipes.

Together, We Eat is a part of a yearlong IKEA effort focusing on everyday life in and around the kitchen – celebrating the many treasured moments that happen there and simple solutions as they relate to growing, cooking, serving and storing food.

Powell was one of three top-prize winners, but a total of 47 first-prize winners across all categories were awarded a $250 IKEA gift card. All 50 recipes and stories will be featured on TogetherWeEat.com/contest at various points throughout 2016, starting with the three grand prize winners.

Since its 1943 founding in Sweden, IKEA has offered home furnishings of good design and function at affordable prices. There are currently more than 377 IKEA stores in 47 countries, including 41 in the U.S.