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Meet Mawa McQueen, Chef/Owner of Mawa’s Kitchen in Aspen, CO
May 24, 2024
Myr favorite tool.
Chinese Cleaver
Your current and/or most recent restaurants
North Shore Country Club
When and where were you born?
Mount Vernon NY
What was your first job in food?
snack bar cook
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
a Doctor
What is your favorite thing about being a chef?
Loving what I do
Did you have an “aha” moment when you knew you wanted to be a chef?
After I took my Mcats and got accepted into Medical School
Best advice you ever got?
Do what you love and it will never be just a job.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
warm Uni
Your favorite ingredient.
Saffron
The ingredient that turns you off the most.
Uni
Your favorite tool.
Chinese Cleaver
What is your favorite thing to do when you’re not cooking.
Fishing
What would you like to do before you get too old to do it.
See the Swiss Alps
Tell us a deep dark secret (doesn’t have to be food related).
Good thing walk in freezers don’t have cameras
How do you deal with the stress?
My long rides home with music playing loud
How did becoming a chef change your life, your direction.
I found that coming from the old school kitchen where you would have to steal cooking methods with your eyes, because everyone would be afraid that you might take there job. And for at least the last 25 years sharing your knowledge with your staff makes your life easier and you have a much stronger dedicated brigade.
Who would you like to meet?
Emeril Lagasse
Who would you like to cook for?
Julia Child if she were still alive
What was the hardest thing for you to learn? Or is there something you just can’t get right?
French
Is there some little something you do for your family to make up for the time you’re not with them?
Chocolate covered Marazapin, and fishing trips
Please give us a cooking tip that people might not know like “adding a little bit of oil to butter so it doesn’t burn.
If you break a Hollandaise sauce you can add a cup of cold water in anothe bowl and slowly add the broken sauce into the water and it will emulsify
Tell us a funny story from the kitchen
It was so hot in my kitchen that my Chef Garde Manger tied a block of Ice cubes to his head with butchers twine.
