SLO County cook competes on Food Network’s ‘Julia Child Challenge.’ Here’s how to watch
.jpeg "Elena Ross-Salonga of Cambria, a contestant on the Food Network’s “Julia Child Challenge,” sets up in the contest kitchen to make her first meal in the competition. The show, which the network describes as contestants ‘cooking alongside their hero, Julia Child,’ begins Monday, March 14.")
A Cambria home cook and reluctant Instagram blogger will be one of eight competitors on the line Monday, March 14, when the Food Network’s “Julia Child Challenge” launches.
The competition, which premieres at 9 p.m., also streams on Discovery+.
A Julia Child devotee for decades, Elena Ross-Salonga said in a March 3 phone interview that she’d never competed in a cooking contest before. “My wife (Jessica Ross-Salonga) is my No. 1 fan, so when she heard about the prospect of me being a contestant, she was just so excited” that disappointing her simply wasn’t an option.
The contestant explained that she also participated “for a handful of reasons besides my love for Julia Child. I have RA (rheumatoid arthritis), and I didn’t know how well my body would perform. But I wanted to stretch myself, see how I could be in contrast with others … to soak it all in, however it all turned out.”
In 1998, Ross-Salonga was 11 when she and family members moved from the Philippines to Vallejo. With parents who worked late shifts, she soon learned to cook for herself and her brother, Eugene Salonga (they also have two sisters). He’s now a chef for a private trainer in Walnut Creek.
Since then, her cooking has blossomed into equal parts of passion, distraction and fun.
Ross-Salonga, 41, said she started watching the Food Network when she was 14 or 15 years old. Her favorite show? “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
Before she and her wife met online, she said, her typical Friday night had been “eating chicken wings and watching DDD.”
Fame, but ‘it’s all about having fun’
And the fame that comes with a Food Network appearance?
“Cameras? Film crews?” Ross-Salonga said with another laugh. “I live in the middle of nowhere for a reason.”
It is a little daunting, but “I’m seeing it through her lens,” the contestant said of her wife. “I do food as a hobby … for fun, relaxation, to challenge myself on the weekends. But I welcome any new experience.”
The contestant with a ready, musical laugh, lilting voice and upbeat attitude said, “I had never wanted an Instagram account before, but I wanted to chronicle the start of my baking habits, that whole endeavor, and be silly with it … just as Julia said, it’s all about having fun.”
Ross-Salonga’s Instagram handle is “justmemywifeandfood.”
When asked if baking has always been her favorite cooking genre, Ross-Salonga’s laugh was emphatic.
“I only started that about three years ago,” she said, giggling, adding that before then, whenever she gave a party and people asked what they could bring, “I’d tell them to bring dessert so I didn’t have to bake.”
However, after a few desserts arrived that didn’t appeal to her, she decided, “OK, wanting control, I’m going to fix this. I started learning how to bake, (and then began) falling into the hole” of not only wanting to make the bread and desserts, but make them really well.
Echoing Food Network star/judge Chef Alex Guarnaschelli, Ross-Salonga said, “Baking is like a blood sport. You fail a ton. It’s a great humbling experience, an equalizer.”
For example, her recent attempt to make the tricky, crusty-topped cream puffs called choux au craquelin didn’t turn out as planned. “Cambria was hot that day,” she said, “and the craquelin was not cooperating.”
The interviewer asked Ross-Salonga if she’d feared the competition might include a troublesome cuisine or ingredient, such as the dreaded, stinky durian fruit that sent many a “Chopped” contestant into a tailspin and the aroma of which CNN compares to a blend of “raw sewage, rotting flesh and smelly gym socks.”
“I’m from the Philippines,” where durian is grown and consumed often, Ross-Salonga. “Durian is not anything new to me.”
Her only cuisine concern, she said, was that there’d be one she wasn’t familiar with.
Setting up the show
The Food Network describes the competition as contestants “cooking alongside their hero, Julia Child.” And, indeed, they were “guided by Child herself, through a larger-than-life television screen right in the middle of all the action.”
The challenge has already happened, but the Food Network representative declined to reveal when or where it had been taped.
Child revolutionized American cooking with her dozen-and-a-half best-selling books and three decades of TV shows. Her humor and informal manner made French cooking look easy, and with her guidance, it was.
“Julia Child is a culinary hero to cooks everywhere — her love of food and sense of humor set the tone for this one-of-a-kind competition. From the kitchen set to Julia’s own words, the level of detail in each episode can only be described as mind-blowing,” said Courtney White, president of Food Network and Streaming Food Content, Discovery Inc. “At the same time, the series is also very intimate, with competitors sharing their personal food journeys and how Julia Child changed their lives; we cannot wait for viewers to experience this show.”
In the first Challenge episode, the website says, competitors were to “take inspiration from the meal that changed Julia’s life and set her on course to changing the culinary world (a restaurant meal of sole meunière). Then they must make the dish that changed their own lives for Antonia (head judge Lofaso) and guest judges Francis Lam and Michael Voltaggio.”
According to the network, in the next round of that episode, dishes “are served family-style, with competitors and judges sampling each dish and sharing stories about their food and personal connection to Julia.”
As is the Food Network’s customary competition pattern, one competitor is sent home each week and one declared that episode’s winner, whittling down the field week by week until only the champion remains.
They’re battling to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris to follow in their mentor’s footsteps and study for three months at the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, from which Child graduated in 1951.
Guest chefs who share judging duties with Lofaso include Molly Baz, Stephanie Boswell, Alvin Cailan, Cliff Crooks, Susan Feniger, Dorie Greenspan, Melissa King, Nilou Motamed, Jacques Pepin, Sherry Yard and Brooke Williamson (who won the network’s first season of Tournament of Champions).
Ross-Salonga’s competitors include four men and four women, two contestants with the same first name. Three are from the West Coast, and the rest hail from hometowns from New York City to Missouri.
They are: Bill Borman (Hudson, New York); Christine Fiorentino (Hoboken, New Jersey); Dustin Hogue (Chicago); Jaíne Mackievicz (Oceanside); Britt Moore (New York City); Dustin Rennells (Chillicothe, Missouri); and Fabrizio Villalpando (Los Angeles).
Coming to Cambria
The Cambria competitor credits another Julia (Morgan, the groundbreaking architect of Hearst Castle) for inadvertently changing the Ross-Salongas’ lives during a years-ago day trip to the historic house museum.
“Not wanting me to be a grumpus during the tour,” from lack of food, Elena Ross-Salonga said, “we stopped for breakfast in a little town called Cambria,” somewhere they’d never visited before.
The contestant said they immediately “just fell in love with the tiny place … with Cambria, the beauty, the ocean and nature.”
Elena and Jessica Ross-Salonga moved to the small Central California coastal village in October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.
Now the marketing automation specialist and her law-firm administrator wife both work remotely from home.
Once the celebrity “top stops spinning,” as she phrases it, she doesn’t think the contest experience will change their lives, long term. “We live in pretty much the best place in America,” she said. “I love living here, this is where I want to be. Anything else is a bonus.”
