Some of Jesse Papirio's best memories of growing up came from spending time in her great-aunt's and her grandmother's kitchens, learning the art of cooking - specifically, Italian cooking.
Those childhood lessons paid off recently when the Walpole High School senior was named a finalist for a national high school cooking competition.
The 19th annual High School Chef of the Year competition will be held Friday through Sunday at Johnson & Wales University in Miami. Twenty students from across the country qualified for the contest's two categories: entree and dessert.
Papirio, 17, will compete in the entree category with nine others; the other 10 contestants will compete for best dessert. She calls her dish "Bella Chicken."
Contest rules directed entrants to create an original recipe that incorporated their family heritage or ethnicity. For Papirio, whose father, John Papirio, is Italian, that meant modifying a pair of favorite family dishes.
Because organizers hope to increase awareness of teen obesity, the entree must be nutritionally balanced.
Parts of Papirio's dish came from family recipes, others from her own imagination. Most of the dish coalesced after Papirio spent a great deal of time - actually, the four days before the contest deadline passed - "just playing around in the kitchen."
Her bella chicken uses chicken cutlets as its centerpiece. First, she pounds, then trims, enough chicken cutlets for four plates. Before sauteing the cutlets in olive oil, she breads each.
Afterward, she bakes the chicken with a sauce of her invention, made from white wine and chicken stock, with portabella mushrooms.
On the side, Papirio will serve roast potatoes, a slight variation of her grandmother's traditional dish.
"Just a little less crispy," Papirio said.
Along with the potatoes, she will serve asparagus roasted with Pecorino Romano cheese, wrapped in thinly sliced roasted red and yellow peppers.
The dish's final flourish came to Papirio as she left church with her family one Sunday morning. Right after "the lightbulb went on," Papirio told her mother she knew how to accent her dish - with a rose garnish on the ridge of each plate.
While roasted red peppers make up the petals, the stem comes from a homemade pesto recipe of her father's - with a little less garlic.
Kimberly Papirio, Jesse's mother, says her daughter often stays in on Friday and Saturday evenings to cook with her father. But her daughter disputes this, saying it may have happened once. She will say, however, that cooking with her father "was just something we always did."
