ARLINGTON — More than 30 area teens descended on the Arlington Library for the second in a four-month series of programs designed to give them a taste of something new.

“Chopped: A Library Foodie Competition” made its debut in September of this year, with 12 participants and another dozen people serving as spectators, and on Oct. 20 the program’s second session maintained at least as many audience members while more than doubling the number of teens who took part in cooking up some surprisingly elaborate dishes with relatively simple ingredients.

“The team that won was four girls who made miniature chicken sandwiches and ginger snaps, but they were only one point removed from the next runners-up,” said Jocelyn Redel, teen librarian for the Arlington Library. “They were all quite tasty.”

On Oct. 20, Redel supplied an entire table full of ingredients, from fruit-flavored breakfast cereal to nacho cheese, from which the young gourmands could pick and choose, plus three mystery ingredients that weren’t revealed until all her aspiring chefs had gathered round. On that Thursday, the mystery ingredients turned out to be canned chicken, Ritz crackers and peperoncinis.

“Wikipedia lists the challenges for the ‘Chopped’ TV show, so that’s been a big help,” Redel said. “This is my first year doing the ‘Chopped’ competitions here at the library, and they seem to be pretty popular. I knew cooking competition shows were popular with teens, but I was wondering whether this would work, which was why I originally scheduled it for just four months, from September through December.”

Given the increasing turnout for the teen cooking competitions, Redel expects they’ll continue past that four-month window at the Arlington Library, although she acknowledged that conducting the contests has been a bit of a learning curve.

“From here on out, I think we’ll stipulate no more than two dishes per team,” Redel laughed. “One team managed to make about half a dozen dishes out of this month’s ingredients.”

Shelby McLachlan, a 13-year-old from Arlington who was a member of that team, learned some lessons of her own.

“It’s really fun to throw a lot of ingredients together to try and make something yummy without tasting it before it’s judged,” McLachlan said. “You have to think about what might go together and what wouldn’t. You also have to keep in mind if one of your judges doesn’t like olives,” she added, referencing fellow teen Cameron Heys, who taste-tested the dishes alongside Redel and Marysville’s Julie Berst, another adult judge who was filling in for her mother this month.

While some teams had as many as half a dozen members, some had as few as three. Justin Weinstock is another 13-year-old from Arlington who’d never entered the “Chopped” competition before this month.

“It made me hungry,” Weinstock said. “If it wasn’t for the half-hour time period, we might have been more ambitious or used a more complex recipe.”

Weinstock nonetheless looks forward to testing his culinary mettle next month, as do many of his fellow budding “foodies,” even if many of them took vastly differing messages to heart from the experience. Hannah Wood and her teammates agreed that prospective chefs should read their food labels carefully and “not just throw things together randomly,” while teammates Destyn Hancock, Kenny Williams and Talon Pomerlake offered their own advice.

“You shouldn’t care what anyone else will think,” Hancock said, as he, Williams and Pomerlake argued over whether the taco sauce, bacon bits or nacho cheese were the key toppings for their Ramen noodle-based dish.

“It’s great that we can engage their creative processes like this,” Redel said. “It’s a wonderful way for kids to come together and meet new people.”

The next “Chopped: A Library Foodie Competition” is set for Nov. 17 at 3 p.m. in the Arlington Library, located at 135 N. Washington Ave.