5 unashamedly biased reasons why I think Kat totally deserves the Best Food in Morzine award!

2015 is the inaugral year for the Source Awards for Excellence and at Sunday’s awards ceremony, we came away clutching the Best Food award and couldn’t be happier! We have had an amazing team this year and huge thanks goes to them for their hard work and dedication to providing fantastically consistent food to our chalet guests, especially our chefs Leo, Katy, Ruta & Morgan. But I am going to take the opportunity to tell you about how great my wife is! (She doesn’t know I am writing this and will probably not thank me for this)

Kat is the mastermind behind AliKats food and as Head Chef she has done a remarkable job. This has been a proof of concept year for AliKats. Going from 1 to 3 Morzine chalets in a single season was always going to be a tough challenge and after 3 years of Kat cooking every meal herself, we had to come up with a formula that allowed us to maintain the level of quality we are known for. Here are 5 examples of her awesomeness and dedication to creating fantastic food:

1. We wrapped up last season season on Friday 25th April. Wilf, our soon, was born on Sunday 27th April. On Tuesday 29th April, Kat was breast-feeding with one hand and beginning the mammoth task of menu planning with the other.
2. She created the whole of this year’s menu from scratch. Like all good “artists”, she has borrowed ideas from elsewhere but every single dish has at least 1 element or method that is unique to AliKats
3. Creating our menu took hundreds of hours of researching, thinking, cooking & tweaking. Tips & advice came from a very broad range of inputs including: family recipes and techniques passed down by word of mouth, a very good friend of ours who runs Food, Wine & Company, cook books, the internet and of course eating out in as many different restaurants as we can!
4. Her spreadsheet containing the AliKats menu, which she tweaks each week based on which guests are staying, has literally thousands of lines in it. This is made up of:
   1. Hot breakfasts x 7 (one for each morning of the week)
   2. Cake each day x7
   3. Canapes / pre-dinner nibbles x 6 (one evening is staff night off)
   4. Starters x 6
   5. Main courses x 6
   6. Deserts x6
   7. Children’s meals x 6
   8. Vegetarian & Vegan versions of ALL of the above
   9. Cheese x6
   10. Wines x 12 (Red & White paired with each meal)
   11. This doesn’t include the dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free, nut-free, mushroom-free, sea-food free versions of all of these!
   12. Finally, there is 1 tab per chalet per week with all of the above information in it plus any tweaks for individual dietary requirements
5. On top of running the business, she also makes all the stocks, sauces and ice-creams at home and sends them out to our team of chefs each day.

I am so pleased that all her hard work and talents have been recognised – the proof is quite literally in the pudding.