Do you have what it takes to compete for $10,000?

This area has had some success on these types of shows over the past few years. Hamilton chefs Matt Kershaw and Manny Ferreira each won Chopped Canada on the same network a little while ago. A 12-year-old from Brantford named Audrey MacKinnon won Junior Chef Canada this summer.

More than a few times, Ashley Hoar had thought about trying to join them.

“My mom and (my fiancé) and everyone has been begging me for five years to go on a cooking show,” she says.

So the 25-year-old applied. Why not, she figured. She knows she can cook.

Since she was a little girl, she’s been in love with the kitchen. Her first solo effort came when she was about 10. A quiche she recalls a little too well.

“I didn’t wash the spinach enough,” she laughs. “It was really gritty.”

By the time she was going to high school at Sherwood Secondary, she was working at a local health food store and had become obsessed — her word — with cooking. So much so that she was constantly teased by her friends — the friendly kind of teasing — because, c’mon, who’s into fancy cuisine in high school? Though the jokes stopped when she’d invite them back to her place and cook them dinners.

After she graduated, she studied holistic nutrition. And when she met her boyfriend-now-fiancé, she found a new audience for her creations. Matt Carey is a hockey player who was eventually signed by the Chicago Blackhawks and has carved out a pro career in the minors and across Europe. He was always hungry, Hoar quips.

“I would cook for all his teammates.”

She’d make healthy stuff. Gluten free and vegan meals which are her thing but not necessarily the kinds of foods they might think they’d find appealing. Yet somehow the plates always seemed to end up clean.

Anyway, a few months after applying for the show, she was walking to the grocery store in a tiny German town near the Swiss border where Matt was playing for a pro team when her phone dinged. An email from the Food Network.

“Congratulations,” it read. “You’ve been selected.”

Uh, great, she thought. But I’m in Germany.

No problem. The network flew her back, brought her to a studio in Toronto and taped an episode.

The show pits four home cooks who have not been to culinary school in a competition to create three dishes that are ultimately judged by 10 expert chefs who sit as a group in bleachers and watch the goings on. Hence the name, Wall of Chefs.

“They’re literally staring at us the entire time we’re cooking,” Hoar says.

The first dish the contestants make is a personal favourite. She made a Middle Eastern dish called Shakshuka with whipped tahini. Her offering was chosen as best of the four.

In the second round, she had to pull together a spur-of-the-moment creation with a handful of surprise ingredients she had no idea were coming. In her case, chorizo sausage, broccoli and blue cheese. She made a chorizo burger with onion chutney and broccoli cole slaw

And in the final round, she had to make a restaurant quality pasta dish. When the ground lamb she thought would be available suddenly wasn’t, she regrouped and created a five-cheese-and-bacon macaroni and cheese.

“I was freaking out,” she says. “I thought it wouldn’t be elevated enough for a restaurant.”

Turns out it was.

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And when the judges announced she’d won — not just the contest but the $10,000 that’s going right into her saving-for-a-house fund — thereby keeping this area’s hot streak on televised cooking shows alive, how did she react? Leaping around? Whooping? Cartwheels?

Nope. Just a smile.

“I was kind of shocked.”