About Kj

I began life in the small rural town of Temuka, South Island New Zealand. Born to parents who were basically kids themselves. Early life was tough & my teens were rocky & turbulent.

But I had two loving, grounded & exceptional grandparents.
I spent a lot of weekends & school holidays with them on their lifestyle block. (The Kiwi version of a croft) I believe I wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for them.

They had exceptionally high standards & old-fashioned views which I adopted from a very young age. I was determined to be my own person, grow wings of my own & not be a victim of my past.

Food brought us together as a family. I would help Nana & Grandad in the garden, the orchard, feeding the animals & then cooking our meals.

I would sit with Grandad under a cherry tree scraping the skins off the new potatoes or picking asparagus with Nana, I am not sure if I was very helpful, but these are the fondest & happiest moments of my childhood.

I found a way to become grounded with them, being surrounded by food & animals made the rubbish bits of life disappear.

To this day food & cooking still grounds me, as soon as I get my hands into food a light goes on within me, I begin to feel present, content & focused.

I will be forever grateful for the introduction to fresh ingredients made into simple no fuss dishes that helped me become the chef I am today.

Like so many chefs, school was a bloody disaster for me, I was a troubled teenager & after a teacher told me I was a miserable failure, I started to believe it. On turning 16 I left home, quit school & went on a little journey of self-destruction.

The local catering & hotel school were advertising an Introduction to Hospitality & Tourism course at the local Polytech. This was a 6-week foundation course looking at basic cookery, customer service skills & making coffee. It turns out that the minute I stepped into an industrial kitchen with all the bustle, smells & scary chefs I knew where I needed to be.

I started the Professional Cookery course with the next intake & I didn’t look back. For 2 years I studied non-stop, I was un-stoppable. I filled notebooks & diaries like a person obsessed. I took every book out of the library & I completed every module & course that the college had to offer.

It didn’t matter that I couldn’t spell or write properly, because I had found my thing & now my brain was open to learning.

At this point we started to also realise I was actually dyslexic not stupid!

I represented our college at The New Zealand Culinary Fare twice. Having the opportunity to go to Auckland to compete in Toque Do’r competition within a team, it was an incredible opportunity. On winning it many doors opened for me & those doors led to coming to work in the UK.

I was 21 when I set off on my solo adventure to the UK. For the next two years I became a sponge, burying myself in the London cooking & food scene. Any time off I had I travelled, ate & again read books (not bad for a miserable failure).

I was incredibly lucky to work with Annie O’Carroll, an amazing chef who took me under her wing. She taught me about textures, flavours & foods I had never heard or let alone dreamt of cooking. On my first shift she had me out back of the bistro smacking octopus off the wall tenderising the tentacles like she had done in Tunisia, I thought it was a wind up, but no it wasn’t. I will forever be grateful the lessons I learned in that tiny kitchen with her & Chris.

When she sold up & headed for Samoa, I hit the road heading north for Scotland. I came to Aviemore for a weekend skiing, stayed after falling in love with the place, then my hubby Al & then stumbled my way into taking on a run-down little Highland cafe.

Like the rest of the UK, we were hit hard in early 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent restrictions imposed on cafes and restaurants. As the crisis deepened it became clear that we would be forced into taking the devastating decision not to re-open the Café in Aviemore.

Despite this I was determined to forge a new adventure from the foundations that had been laid with care and commitment over so many years.

I decided to operate instead from my amazing home town of Grantown on Spey (just 12 miles from Aviemore) and showcase the kick-ass products available locally. In the early days I baked in my home kitchen and sold bread, scones and cake from the doorstep! It quickly became clear that there was huge demand and that we needed a bigger premises. I found the perfect location, an industrial unit in Grantown, which over the course of a few months we transformed into the Bothy Bakery and the dream became reality!