Million-dollar question: What would you do if you won the Pillsbury Bake-Off?

Mathews said she's "not any big deal in the kitchen. If you came unannounced, I'd be able to put a meal together and it would be good, but not beyond imagination."

Some of her Bake-Off experiments that never made the cut include canned baked beans in a dessert bar, a mashed potato pie, apple dumplings from canned biscuits and a salsa seafood creole. The Salsa Couscous Chicken was an afterthought, as a way to use up the half-jar of salsa left from making the creole dish.

"I just kept trying stuff," she said. "The recipes go through so many screenings, it's impossible to know what will make it through."

She said the prize money has added a "pleasant dimension" to her life, but there were no outrageous purchases.

"Silly and outrageous isn't really me. Winning the Bake-Off did not include a personality transplant," she said. "We've never been extravagant, or traveled in showy circles, but then $50,000 a year doesn't really put you in the category of dripping in diamonds or hiring butlers and maids."

With her first $50,000 check, Mathews put $10,000 each into accounts for her daughter and granddaughter (who was born the same day Mathews won the Bake-Off). She and her husband bought a three-year-old pickup truck for trips to their remote cabin that they already owned, and they planned to use the rest to drill a well at the cabin. But the well never got drilled and they ended up selling the property.

"Don't get me wrong. I love having the money. I love the security it gives me, the options," she said. "It represents that somebody thought I had a good idea. That a bunch of judges got together and said this is the one we liked the best."

Was it worth a million dollars? "I don't think there's any one recipe that would satisfy that kind of expectation. There's no such thing as a best recipe in the country in a given year. But the beauty of my recipe is that it's a very matter-of-fact, get-dinner-on-the-table thing."

Mathews' literary honors and awards seem more personal to her. "That's closer to what I'm all about, something that I put my heart and soul into, unlike making a recipe, which can be somewhat trivialized."

SUZANNE CONRAD

"It's an obscene amount of money for a really simple recipe," admitted Suzanne Conrad, when asked about her Oats 'n Honey Granola Pie that won the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 2004.

In a telephone interview from her home in Findlay, Ohio, Conrad added, "I think it helped that it was simple, old-fashioned and has a different flavor. The granola bars are the only unique thing about the recipe."