Kitchen whiz Kate Bracks is ditching the bright lights to spend time with her kids and live her B&B dream.
Before setting foot in the MasterChef studio to compete in the show’s final episode, Kate Bracks knew she was already a winner, blessed with three beautiful children and a loving husband to cheer her on. And now the pressure test of the MasterChef finale is behind her, the modest mum from Orange is making the surprising admission that her dearest dream is to abandon a lucrative career in cooking and return to her former anonymous life in the peaceful valleys of central west New South Wales.
Despite the delicate dishes she spent hours slaving over, and the “techniques and skills” she acquired along the way, Kate says she doesn’t want to run a restaurant or star in her own show. She wants to run a sleepy B&B. “I have an underlying dream of owning a bed-and-breakfast,” Kate reveals. “I look at what [past winners] Adam Liaw and Julie Goodwin have done before me and I know plans change, so I’m open to whatever is coming, but still, deep down, is the desire to own a B&B.
That’s my gift, that’s my skill and that’s something I can make work with the family. The idea of a cookbook freaks me out.” Kate, 36, famously puts her family ahead of her industry ambitions, so her vision of a tiny hotel consisting of “small cottages set on land near Orange, amongst rolling hills, at the luxury end of things” is the perfect solution to the modern dilemma of juggling motherhood with the satisfaction of succeeding in business.
“I’m much more interested in people than food. I want people to come and stay with me and feel nurtured and pampered,” Kate smiles. “There would be options for food…of enjoying a meal at night around a communal table.”
Read more about Kate’s food dream in this week’s Woman’s Day, on sale August 8, 2011.
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