Katie Stabler from Mobberley is cooking up a new career after appearing on the BBC’s Masterchef.
Mobberley charity worker Katie Stabler is taking cooking to another level after appearing on the hit foodie show Masterchef.
Katie’s so bitten by the culinary bug that she’s teamed up with other contestants to provide pop up catering services in Cheshire and beyond.
She and fellow Masterchef contestant Chris Hale were recently at The Cheese Yard on King Street in Knutsford for a fromage -inspired evening, which they plan to repeat in the future.
And with a number of other engagements in venues around the country, Katie, whose day job is as a deputy chief executive for a debt charity, is getting her fill of professional cookery.
‘Of course I’d love to do it for a living,’ says Katie, who made it to the quarter finals of the show earlier this year.
‘I teamed up with other Masterchef finalists and started approaching established venues to do cookery events with them and it has just snowballed. To have the opportunity to do this and maybe do it full time eventually is fantastic.’
Cookery-mad Katie entered the competition on a whim and went through the gruelling audition process before making it onto the show.
‘I’m obsessed with cooking but it was my partner Gavin Jones who came across the application and encouraged me to fill it in,’ says Katie.
‘Obviously they get thousands of entries but the thing that probably got me through was a bit quirky- I never cook the same thing twice and they are clearly looking for something a little bit different. The thing is I just love everything and want to try out every recipe!
‘They interview you and discuss everything in depth. You don’t just talk about cooking but about what inspires you, your life and lots of other things.
‘And yes, you do have to do some cooking to make sure you can actually deliver the goods.
‘Every step of the way was a 100% brilliant but it really takes over your life - and when it’s over it is like the end of the world.’
Katie reveals that everything is kept ‘super confidential’ in the run up to the show, so only her boss knew why she was taking a holiday for an indefinite period of time’.
‘He was incredibly supportive, plus I have a degree of flexibility with work so I could take the necessary time off, however it wasn’t until it was actually shown on TV that my mum found out.
‘My partner had the job of eating the same dish over and over again which was a novelty for him as I don’t cook the same thing twice.’
From her first dish Katie was deemed a culinary star in the making. Indeed Masterchef hosts John Torode and Greg Wallace pronounced her Katsu curry as the best dish of the show.
‘It was brilliant to get such positive comments from them,’ she says.
‘I was really lucky with my dishes until the very end as everything they said was so positive.’
Unfortunately, it was a pasta dish which Katie created for the quarter final invention test which proved to be her downfall.
‘I was pleased with what I did,’ she explains.
‘But the standards were just so high. Unfortunately it was just the way it went. They never look back at your previous dishes and judge them as a whole, you’re only as good as your last dish, so it was a very sad train journey back home for me.’
Katie is in the middle of creating a website but meanwhile she can be contacted on the following social networks:
Twitter: @foodie_a
Instagram: @katies_kitchen_x
