Contest 2011 March Winners

I know how much time it takes to create a new recipe and so would like to thank everyone who took part in this month’s contest. There were some very good entries and I had a hard time selecting the five best ones. It came very close. There were a couple of very good recipes that I had to disqualify simply because of incomplete recipe instructions. So please make sure next time to submit a detailed method and ingredient list.

Update (2011-02-02): I checked the voting logs and yes there was a huge discrepancy among the top 2 winners (charu and ruma). Additionally the other entries also showed something strange in the logs. So I’ve decided to discredit the votes altogether and select two recipes that I thought were the best out of the five. I set up the voting because I thought it would be fun and interactive for the users (actually many of you requested it), but never expected the abuse as we’ve seen in this month’s contest. In the future, if the voting is reinstated, I will make sure it is robust enough to thwart such abuse.

The winners that I’ve manually selected are the following:

1st Place: Aditi Gupta (Crunchy Bean salad with beetroot and fruits)

2nd Place: Spoorty Prasad (Bean Sprouts Salad Spring Roll)

Congratulations to both of you!


I would like to very much thank the other participants this month:


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19 thoughts on “Contest 2011 March Winners

  1. Was interesting to watch. Manjula aunty should overrule the voting result and choose winners by her own experience (considering equal opportunity to all five contestants; including the top two).

    1. Look at the zeal to win the contest….. they might have invested loads of hours for monitoring , finding people and ways for voting multiple times!!!

    2. I think the voting system was actually meant to spread the word about the website and to gain publicity. If this is the case, the strategy has failed to serve its purpose as most of the votes are fake.

  2. You are absolutely right Shreay, all votes are fake. I have been monitoring this for days now. As soon as someone start voting the votes of top 2 contestants start increasing by 50-60. All fake

    1. No one can blame the contestants alone.
      From the beginning, the votes have been increasing in bulk for each finalist. It’s only that some gave up and others are still continuing. Now that only two are remaining, it is but natural for them to continue, given the possibilities to deceive such a voting system.

      The system adopted here is itself wrong. All the people who follow Manjulaji’s website would highly appreciate if she herself chooses the winners instead of this vulnerable voting system. That would save the time of everyone and it would be fair enough as well.

      This has been going on since last 4-5 days as I have been closely monitoring this and previous contests as well, why did the administrator not notice it earlier.

      1. I think Yasmin is right. The voting system is also a major criteria for this kind of behavior in the contest. Being a contest the judge should be the selector and not the readers. And also I feel if the readers are given a choice to vote they should be a officially logged in person on the website and not anyone as it says one. I hope Manjula ji can correct this from next time.
        Dear Manjula ji
        Pls donot think we all are blaming you. such things are quite viable in websites like this. we need to be careful by not allowing any pranks happening.

    1. There are different kinds of salad. For example potato salad, you don’t expect eating a raw potato,right? The same for beans, they need to be cooked first before you add your vinaigrette.

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