Finally, we can submit our report on this past edition of the North Market Fiery Foods Festival. Rather than go into all the details down to the nth degree, we’ll let the pictures tell the story. Be forewarned…this is a long post with lots of pictures. Also, at the end of this story is the video for the Chile Pepper Eating Contest. You can scroll to the bottom if you want to skip to that as well.

To start things out, it was a crappy weather day for a Fiery Foods Festival. Central Ohio had been deluged with a fair amount of snow already, and we were due to get a couple more inches during the morning. Above, you can see the view out our front porch in terms of how snowy it was. Getting down to the North Market was a little challenging, and we suspected that the inclement weather had a chance of keeping the attendance numbers down a little. Being the chileheads that we are, no amount of snow, sleet, or freezing rain was going to keep us from our day of spicy fun!

Whether we’re really local chilehead celebrities or not, we were graciously asked to be judges for both the amateur salsa competition (the dip, not the dance) and the professional cooks chili challenge. You can see Joe’s official placeholder and spot at the judging table.

Patiently waiting for his samples of salsa, Joe shows that this whole judging thang isn’t all that rough. Six (or maybe it was five) salsas were up for the prize, but more people didn’t make it down to the Market with their salsa entries…possibly due to the weather.

Anthony from Urban Chefs was one of the vendors who was there selling his wares. We have five (5) hot sauces from him that are on our slate of to-do reviews over the next several weeks. Stay tuned for those.

Hot & spicy cheese was available from the fine folks at Curds and Whey. Believe us when we tell you that the habanero cheddar cheese was awesome. It didn’t take long for the public circling the market to polish off this stuff.

At 11am started the Professional Chefs Chili Cookoff, and Linda (2nd from left) took her turn as one of the judges. There were some amazing chilis to be had, and no shortage of creativity from the chefs with their creations.

This was the lineup for the professional chefs, as they began to assemble for the competition. Anthony of Urban Chefs and CaJohn were among the competitors this year, and CaJohn was hoping to better his runner-up performance of 2006.

There’s CaJohn himself, stylin’ as usual in his fine chilehead garb. Sadly, his chili did not place in the top 3 this year. John Skaggs’ “Cowboy Chili” triumphed after a taste-off ensued when there was a first-place tie. Joe tasted both and preferred the 2nd place chili, by Andrew Brannin, but both were decent enough to merit the championship for this year. Better luck next year, CaJohn!

Sue Hard of CaJohns Flavor and Fire was stylin’ in her own right with her cool shades. The CaJohns booth was far and away the busiest one at the market, and there was always a busy throng of people trying out the variety of hot sauces, salsas, and other goodies available for sale. The brave few who tried the Frostbite-laden lemonade were shocked at how good it was!

At noon, the amateur chili chefs warmed up their crockpots to duel for their own chili championship title. The crowd from the professional chili chefs deftly shifted over to try out their concoctions as well.

Mark Williams (of CaJohns Fiery Foods) was the champion of the amateur chili chefs. When asked if he would share any of his prize with CaJohn, he quickly answered, “Hell no! Sue’s the one who helped me the most.” Sorry, Mark, but we think you may be on extra dishes duty in the kitchen for a while. LOL!

Here, Mark ladles out samples of his winning chili for the crowd to taste. The great thing about being the winner (besides the prize) is that everyone wants to try your chili, and you get cleaned out pretty quickly. It’s always nice to carry home an empty crockpot.

A real visual treat was this cake outside Mozart’s North Market Bakery. If you take away the little Tabasco sauce bottles, it actually resembles out wedding cake pretty closely…even down to the marzipan chile peppers. (We even had it published in Chile Pepper magazine way back when!)

A closer view of the cake, which they later set afire before slicing it up. All the pastries and other sweet goodies form Mozart’s are absolutely top-notch. That, plus they have someone walking around the Festival every year in a chile pepper outfit handing out chile pepper-shaped cookies…which rock!!! Very, very nice people as well, btw.

We’ve written about Jeni’s Fresh Ice Creams before, but here are the two ’spicy’ ones that are our favorites. The Thai Chili ice cream is a good finish to nearly every meal we’ve had there.

After the chile pepper eating contest, was a cool seminar called “Chili 101″ given in tag-team format by CaJohn and Chuck Evans of Montezuma Brand. Chuck (on the right) dealt more with the history and spread of chile peppers, which included some info that even we didn’t know.

Seen above is CaJohn whipping up his own chili for the crowd. Simplicity was the key, as John’s chili recipe (the main one, anyway) is about as simple as it gets in using a pound of meat and one jar of his salsa, multiplied by as many pounds of chili as you want to make. The green chili was pretty tasty as well.

As promised above, here is the link to the video for the Chile Pepper Eating contest:

2007 North Market Chile Pepper Eating Contest

The video is in Apple Quicktime format. It’s a 14 minute video, meaning it’s a huge damn file which may take several minutes to load depending on your connection speed. Enjoy!