As promised, Johnny "Meatballs" DeCarlo has choosen a winner to be his Meatball Making Assistant for this Friday's Hot From The Kettle video.

Here's what Johnny wrote:

There were a lot of great answers to the question: "If you could have a dinner date with any celebrity chef, who would it be? And what would you eat?" My favorite response goes to Susan Horan who wrote in the following answer…

Seeing how i dont know to many of the zillion celebrity chefs that are all over the tv these days, i'd have to say i'd want to have dinner with my mother. she was the single most important inspiration behind melody's "hot from the kettle" endeavor and i dont think any "celebrity" has a dam thing on my mom. Not to mention she cornered the market on that "secret ingredient" in every meal....love. What would be better than that.
Susan Horan

Susan’s answer about the love factor was truly from the heart and that’s why I loved it so much. My mom and grandmothers would not like the “celebrity chef” tag, but they were both celebrities in my house when I was a kid and they cooked enough food to feed an army every day—enough for the army, navy and marines on holidays! Certainly to me, that equates to the task a classically-trained chef in a five star establishment goes through every night on the line. My inspiration for all my cooking endeavors are the fine females that raised me as a kid—they’re all self-taught and they all prepared scratch made meals from the heart. I want to be looked at as a modern day incarnation of one’s nonna with my meatballs. Congrats to Susan for winning the contest…she’ll be my meatball rolling assistant on the set of the Hot From The Kettle show this Friday!