For the third year running, my good friend Lisa and I are engaged in a cookie contest. We formerly had only one category – “Best Chocolate Chip Cookie” – but have now expanded to it to include a “Best All Around Cookie.” For the contest, a bunch of us assemble in her super duper gourmet kitchen with several ovens, a Wolf range with six burners and enough counter space to draw and quarter a couple of cows. It’s a great kitchen to cook in and to just mill about in. So anyway, there’s a few of us who compete, but none so keenly as Lisa and me.

I have won “Best Chocolate Chip Cookie” two years running now through no fault of my own. I’m an underbaker and I use Ghiradelli chips, which the *judges* appear to like. The bragging rights that go with winning this extremely informal award are worth it alone. I torture her all year! But it’s good natured. Lisa’s my cooking pal, someone I speak to nearly every night as we are both whipping up dinner. We compare notes, take each other leftovers and have a great thing going in this department. We joke that everyone is lucky to know us, but secretly we really believe it.

Anyway, I’m mad obsessed with winning “Best All Around Cookie” and Chris tells that he thinks I am too competitive. It’s fun for us! Lisa likes the competition as much as I do and I don’t think it’s competitive in anything but a really fun way, although I do think she may have been taken aback when I mentioned bringing my potential entries into my coffee group for them to try. Chris kept saying “Can you believe she has a focus group?”

My friend Joanna also thinks we’re too competitive. She’s the type who helps her opponents with their questions in Trivial Pursuit. That’s just wrong.

I grew up competing, playing games, racing each other across the length of our swimming pool, seeing whose test grades were higher and so forth. It was all in good fun. My mom and dad really fostered this in us and I grew to enjoy it. If you’re going to play, you might as well win. My parents never let us win anything as kids, not monopoly, cards, dominoes, scrabble (which I am crap at by the way) or anything else.

But if you’re going to compete, you also have to be willing to lose from time to time. I just lost a fifty dollar bet about a song lyric. Ironically, it was Lisa’s husband Mike to whom I lost. Go figure.

I’m fairly easy going. I think that I play with and share with others well. I have a lot of friends most of whom get a kick out of competition. But I do wonder why some folks get unnerved by a competitive nature. Do you?

P.S. The contest is December 8th. My entry is French Chocolate Macarons as suggested to me by my friend Mia. Stay tuned.