By Beverly Berkeley
Tim Gallen, The Solebury School’s Director of College Counseling does a great job of helping the school’s seniors get placed in the colleges that best suit their needs, but Tim has other talents as well. He is also a pretty good cook, and Tim recently won the grand prize for Bertucci’s Italian Restaurant’s “Share Your Taste of Italy” contest, with his submitted recipe, Fettuccini Isabella. His winning dish, with some minor modification determined by Bertucci’s Executive Chef Stefano Cordova, now appears on the restaurant’s spring 2009 menu insert.
Having grown up in a family of ten, Tim quickly learned how to fend for himself and help out around the house with assigned chores. During that time he developed a love for cooking. To Tim, cooking was certainly a lot more fun than cleaning the house.
“I loved the excitement of following a recipe and having all of these separate ingredients turn into something good. I learned how to substitute and adjust recipes, and this eventually led to creating a few of my own.”
Tim never imagined that he would enter a recipe contest, but one night he was out to dinner at Bertucci’s Italian Restaurant with his wife and saw the promotion card on the table for the recipe contest. At first, his wife encouraged him to submit an entrée from a seven-course Italian meal that he prepared for family and friends at his engagement dinner.
“I couldn’t submit that, because it wasn’t my own. But I recalled making this pasta dish as part of a Father’s Day dinner a few years ago when I was living with my parents. So I re-created it first at home, using all fresh ingredients. It was the first time I made a tomato sauce from scratch! Then I served it to my wife and parents. When my mom said that she would pay money for the dish, I decided to submit it. I named it Fettuccini Isabella after my mother.”
While creating the dish, he decided to use ingredients that he liked as well. “I like Alfredo sauce, but that is often too rich. So I have a preference for blush sauces which lighten it up with a touch of marinara. I though the other ingredients would complement the sauce with a nice balance of flavors and textures.” He was right.
Tim’s ingenuity with this recipe placed him among the top five finalists, and ultimately the grand prize winner of the contest. There was one finalist from each of five regions, established by Bertucci’s and covered Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Hartford, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Metro New York. Each of the five finalists received a $100 gift card to Bertucci’s. The Grand Prize Winner received an additional $250 plus inclusion of their recipe on the menu.
The finalists were chosen by a team of judges led by Bertucci’s Executive Chef Stefano Cordova. Dishes were judged based on Bertucci’s evaluation of the recipe’s Italian authenticity, the use of fresh ingredients, and its ability to be made at one of Bertucci’s restaurant stations.
“I am excited that Bertucci’s enjoyed my recipe and can’t wait to see it on the menu. I was sincerely surprised to learn that I had won, because as much as I love to cook I never imagined that a restaurant would think that one of my recipes was worthy of being on their menu, particularly one such as Bertucci’s, where I have enjoyed dining on occasion ever since going to one of their restaurants up in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the mid 90s.”

