Chef brings new meaning to cookin’ the books
By Frank Annau
Special to The News
Swapping financial ledgers for recipe books, Marlene Cochrane has found happiness in her lifelong hobby. Cochrane, 49, is the woman behind the meals served at the Casa Loma Motel’s restaraunt. And, recently, she was named chef of the week at Chef2Chef.com and is sharing her Yukon-themed recipes with a worldwide audience online.
“Between me and my sisters, the fact that they didn’t like cooking, and I did, mainly left the food to me and the mess to them,” says Cochrane, explaining how she became interested in her hobby.
However, her culinary interests didn’t catch up with her professional life for quite some time. In fact, she’s a relatively new face to the field. Looking for work, the Manitoba native set out for Whitehorse some 27 years ago.
After enrolling at Yukon College for technical training, she got a job with Mackay & Partners chartered accountants. Following her stint with them, Cochrane found herself traveling to around the territory as a financial adviser with the Yukon Council for First Nations.
Landing in Carmacks, Cochrane fell in love, got married and took up residence in the town.
She returned to Whitehorse in 1999.
It was while entertaining her new neighbors with homemade Chinese food that she received her first compliments on her cooking skills.
“We were in the middle of the meal when one of the neighbors looked up and asked, ‘Why aren’t you into cooking?’”
It was an epiphany. It didn’t take long before Cochrane decided to take a stab at becoming a professional cook.
In the summer of ‘99, she decided to apply for a kitchen job with a sheep-hunting outfitter in the Ruby Range Mountains. She got the job and, for the next 62 straight days, she honed her food-preparation skills.
“When I was through with it all, I had had such a great time that I knew that it was the right career choice for me.”
In the fall, Cochrane decided to take the year off to pursue the culinary arts course offered at Yukon College. When she graduated, she found her skills in immediate demand, she says. “Actually, I’d sent my resume out a month or so before I finished up at the college. Within the first five days of getting out of there, I had the offer I was looking for.”
With that, Cochrane’s former hobby had morphed into a full-time career in the kitchens of Alice’s Restaurant up at the Casa Loma Motel, where she began work in May, 2000.
Today, after two and a half years in the kitchen, she is content with being miles away from the “boredom of numbers.”
“It’s nice up here,” she says of her workplace. “Alice (the owner of the restaurant) and I get along great because we cook so much alike.” They share an improvisational cooking style.
“I never write down any of my cooking recipes,” says Cochrane. “I keep most of them up in my head, or just flat out improvise with what I see.”
Of course, that approach had to be rethought when she received a proposal from the online website Chef2Chef.com, inviting her to contribute to its “theme of the week.”
Cochrane had become a regular at the site forums after stumbling across it while searching for a frosting recipe.
Her message-board suggestions had proved so helpful that she was invited through the club newsletter to share her Yukon-themed recipes with an internet audience.
“My initial response was, Whoa, I’m not a chef!” she says. But they wouldn’t relent and, eventually, wore her down. “They finally convinced me into saying I’d think about it.”
Before long, she made up her mind. And, from November 11 through the 15th, Cochrane was featured as chef of the week at Chef2Chef.com. Bringing a wide variety of food to her Yukon theme, Cochrane served up recipes for sourdough pancakes, moose jerky, smoked salmon chowder, BBQ moose ribs, fried bannock, as well as mossberry and rose-hip jellies, to name a few.
When asked whether there’s anybody who’s influenced or inspired her, She’s quick to give credit.
“Oh yeah, I take plenty of influences from all around me up here.”
However, she eventually narrows down the list of her culinary roots to her family.
“My mother was great with recipes, and my father did a lot of cooking around the house,” she says. “As well as my Grandma, especially her. I picked up a thing or two from my entire family.”
And it seems that skills in the kitchen are continuing to cross generations in Cochrane’s family.
Like her mother, Cochrane’s daughter Pamela demonstrates a passion for cooking. She recently won gold in the Yukon Culinary Arts competition for secondary school students.
“Candy making and cooking are her favorite things to do around the kitchen,” Cochrane says of her daughter’s preferences.
And what about hers?
Cochrane takes a moment to collect her thoughts before responding. “A favorite recipe of mine would probably be my special recipe for fried chicken.”
But, it ís all the variety in the culinary world that keeps things fresh for her from certified accountant to bona fide culinary chef: “It’s, by far, the right career choice for me.”
Frank Annau is an FH Collins student who is practicing for a career in journalism.
Chef2Chef News Desk