SAN DIEGO — As a little girl growing up in the Amazon region of Northern Brazil, Jaíne Mackievicz-Cenci had an unlikely hero — French cookbook author and TV chef Julia Child.
The Oceanside, California resident said she was about 7 years old when she first saw Child cooking spaghetti on a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" episode on Brazilian TV. Not long after that, she tore an advertisement out of a cooking magazine for Le Cordon Bleu, the Parisian culinary school where Child had learned to cook.
Now, thanks to the Food Network and her own kitchen prowess, Mackievicz-Cenci is the winner of Food Network's "Julia Child Challenge" cooking competition show, and her prize is a three-month, all-expense-paid scholarship to Le Cordon Bleu.
