Fighting Hunger One Refrigerator At A Time With Sandra Lee

With the holidays quickly approaching, entertaining is on a lot of people's minds as they get ready to welcome their families into their homes and feed them a feast unlike any other. Along with entertaining, another theme that we see quite often around the holidays is helping others in need, and there's no better way to do this than joining in the fight against hunger. At the New York City Wine & Food Festival earlier this month, LG Electronics hosted an event that promoted entertaining but also helped to fight hunger.

The event, which took place on the eve of the celebrated food festival's kick-off, invited three food influencers — myself as Cook editor of The Daily Meal, Anne Maxfield of Accidental Locavore, and Sydney Kramer of Crepes of Wrath — to compete in a cook-off where we promoted LG's new line of refrigerators, and the winner would have a donation made in their name to the Share Our Strength organization and the Food Bank for New York City. 

Who better to host the event than Food Network's Sandra Lee, whose recipes were used for the competition and who can speak personally about fighting hunger, as her family relied on food stamps to put a meal on the table when she was a child. While most commonly known for her shows such as Semi-Homemade Cooking and Sandra's Money Saving Meals, Lee is also an ambassador to Share Our Strength and was able combine her passion for cooking with a cause that is near and dear to her heart at the LG Electronics event. 

The competition was based on three themes that weaved together entertaining, the recipes we competed with, and the three new LG refrigerators. My theme, "speed," was partnered with the LG Blast Chiller refrigerator, which features a compartment that can chill a bottle 

of wine in less than eight minutes, a convenient entertaining gadget that worked in the same amount of time it took me to whip up Lee's speedy pasta dish for the cook-off.

Maxfield's theme, "ease," went along with Lee's easy chicken Parmesan recipe, the perfect holiday recipe because it's thrown together in a snap, and the Door in Door refrigerator, with a magnetic side door compartment that allows easy access to regularly needed grocery items such as butter, eggs, and milk. Lastly, there was "size," 

which was Kramer's theme for her burger sliders. Her refrigerator surpassed most models of its kind in size, offering 33 cubic feet of space for storage, something that is much needed during the holiday entertaining season.