FAIR: Cooked up recipe for disaster

I am appalled at the North Idaho Fair's REQUIREMENT this year to include a recipe for ANY baked/canned good entered.

This new rule is absolutely ridiculous. Good recipes can take a lifetime to perfect and to simply hand it over to be published in a cookbook which will then be sold, is maddening. I have entered the fair for years and have received countless ribbons. After this year, what would be the point of ever entering a winning recipe? If the whole county, and all my competitors, will be able to buy it?

Sure, I could dumb down the recipes so that anyone trying to replicate it would wind up with a disaster, but how would that make me feel? I just couldn't do that to someone. To my friends and family, I would LOVE to share my recipes, but to turn it into a cookbook for profit on the backs of county cooks is wrong. People who do not submit any entries in the fair would be unaware of this year's change, but the fair goers deserve to know what is going on and why the shelves will, hopefully, be a little thin this year. You sure won't see anything from me.

JENNIFER ASHBY

Coeur d'Alene