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Anyone who has ever cooked for a dinner party knows the essential ingredient is planning. Imagine cooking dinner for 5,000 and the planning that requires. Mackie Gmitter, executive chef at the Austin, Texas, barbecue eatery The Salt Lick, is gearing up to cook for attendees at Woodies, a music festival that's part of the city's South by Southwest fest. The awards ceremony from that festival, the 2014 mtvU Woodie Awards, airs Sunday, March 16, on MTV and mtvU. A few weeks before acts took the stage, Gmitter's menu was set. "It is a bit of a challenge cooking for this amount of people for the Woodie Awards," he says. "We need to be a lot more prepared. The first chef I worked for always told me, 'If you are not two days ahead, you are one day behind.' " Gmitter and his team begin preparations by making sauces and seasoning meat. This is the third time he's cooking for the Woodies. He's making chopped brisket sliders, smoked turkey sliders, pork ribs, coleslaw and Hatch green chili mac and cheese. He is also planning "sloppy nachos," and considering regular ones are not the neatest food, these must be something special, with smoked Gouda and a few other cheeses and chopped beef. His crew makes corn and flour tortillas on site, which gives them, Gmitter says, "that unique flavor. Nothing store bought. You can taste the difference in the first bite." His coleslaw includes jicama and apple with bleu cheese and sweet corn. "It complements the smokiness and tanginess of barbecue," he says. Like all barbecue restaurants, The Salt Lick has a secret sauce. "Our barbecue sauce is much different than traditional barbecue sauce in Texas," says the Texan. "It's a noncook barbecue sauce. Ours is mustard-based, with a good amount of sugars in the spice mix as they smoke. The sugars start caramelizing on the ribs or pulled pork, and we serve our barbecue sauce with the meats as well." BY JACQUELINE CUTLER MTV puts on the feed at the Woodie Awards Mackie Gmitter •What did you have for dinner last night? "I was hanging out with a couple of co-workers, and we decided to do something a little different. We did a seasoned fried chicken, sweet potato waffles and honey bacon whipped cream." •What is always in your refrigerator? "It just depends on the seasons of the year. It could be fresh fruit to a really good sale on steaks at the market. Anything I can find at the farmers market." •What's the one food you hate cooking? "Being a foodie and someone relatively new in the culinary world, if I had to pick a least favorite, it would probably be seafood." •What is your next project? "Growing the brand. We do have Salt Lick Cellars, about 25 acres of vineyards on the property. We are doing our own wines. I have collaborated on a menu for the Salt Lick Cellars and (am) making flat breads and steaks in wood ovens." BEST FILMS SET IN IRELAND "Philomena" (2013): Oscar-nominated (at this writing, the Academy Awards hadn't yet happened) for best picture and best actress for Judi Dench as the title character, this has Philomena searching for the son she had to give up in her youth. Philomena was put in a convent, the course of action then for unwed Irish women "in trouble." Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the script, plays Martin Sixsmith, a journalist who helps Philomena on her quest. Philomena, who stays faithful to her religion, says to Sixsmith, "After I had the sex, I thought anything that feels so lovely must be wrong." "The Magdalene Sisters" (2002): It's 1964 Ireland, and girls are considered fallen whether they were flirts or rape victims. Their families deposit them at convents run by the Magdalene sisters, where they lead extraordinarily grim lives. This follows three women: Rose, who had a child out of wedlock; Bernadette, a flirt; and Margaret, raped by her cousin at a wedding. The asylums where the women were forced to do laundry were real. Over the years, some 30,000 women were estimated to have been held in them until they were closed in 1996. "Waking Ned Devine" (1998): This is set in the fictional Irish village of Tulaigh Mhor, where someone has won the lottery. Naturally, everyone wants to know who won, and two best friends, Michael O'Sullivan and Jackie O'Shea (David Kelly, Ian Bannen), and Jackie's wife, Annie (Fionnula Flanagan), are determined to find out. They deduce it was Ned Devine (Jimmy Keogh), who dropped dead clutching the winning ticket. The entire village – save one woman – go to elaborate lengths to fool lottery officials. "My Left Foot" (1989): Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar, and Brenda Fricker won best supporting actress as his mother in this haunting film that breathes life into Christy Brown's autobiography. Day-Lewis is so hauntingly terrific as a young man with cerebral palsy who can use only his left foot that it's understandable why people thought he actually had the condition. Brown was a Dubliner, a painter and a writer, whose parents believed in him. "The Magdalene Sisters" BY JACQUELINE CUTLER Daniel Day-Lewis of "My Left Foot" Judi Dench and Steve Coogan of "Philomena" 8 The Goshen News • TV Spotlight • March 17-23, 2014

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