Photo: courtesy OWN
Kym Whitleyhas come a long way in her journey to a healthy lifestyle, despite the challenges that come with hosting a food competition show.
The actress and comedienne is host of OWN’sThe Big Holiday Food Fight, a holiday-themed series featuring three home cooks who present family recipes for appetizers, side dishes and desserts. In each round, judges Gina Neely, Darnell “SuperChef” Ferguson and James Wright Chanel try the dishes and eliminate a chef until one winner is left standing with a stocking full of $5,000 in cash.
Though Whitley is not a judge, she still gives each dish a taste. “That’s part of my contract,” she tells PEOPLE. “There is no way I could sit there and not try the food.”
As aWW ambassador, Whitley spoke about how the food program helped her while on the show.
“We had three different cooks and three different rounds so it was definitely trying,” she admits. “If I had not already learned how to live healthily, it would’ve been bad. I got to enjoy the food but without the bad habit of overeating that I had my whole life.”
“Every episode, I wanted each contestant’s phone number to ask, ‘How did you make that? What is that?'” says Whitley. “For all of these recipes, I never saw any pieces of paper or anything.”
Whitley was lucky to recently inherit her own mother’s go-to dishes.
“As a young adult, I used to ask my mom to write her recipes down and she wrote a little book with the recipes,” she says. “My mother passed when my son [Joshua] was very young and we recently moved my father out of his house and to my brother’s house. During this move when we were going through his things, I found all her recipes. Isn’t that fantastic?”
courtesy OWN
Whitley wants her son to think of her cooking when he thinks about the holidays, just as the actress does with her mother’s corn pudding — but she struggles in the kitchen, she admits.
“I try to be creative when making food but I am not a cook and I don’t have a lot of time, so I feel guilt as a mother about that. I wonder, what holiday memories will he have?” she says. “Will he be able to say, ‘My mom always made this dish’? He doesn’t have that! So I am trying to learn a dish that I can make every holiday.”
“I grew up on casseroles, so I made a tuna casserole for my son,” she adds, laughing. “I am not going to say whether he liked it or not.”
The Big Holiday Food Fightfinale airs Sunday, Dec. 19 at 12 p.m. ET/PT on OWN.
source: people.com
