A Richmond woman who makes killer lasagna is auditioning for MasterChef Canada on Tuesday.
Kirsti Sater hopes to win a spot on the TV show to demonstrate her culinary skills and her aptitude for cooking on camera.
“My biggest dream of my life would be to have a cooking show,” she said. “When I graduated, I wanted to be a chef. But I had kids and wasn’t able to go to university.”
She’s a manager at the Lush factory in Richmond, but said she’d love to start working in the culinary scene. Her family is contemplating a move to Kelowna, and she wants to work at an eatery attached to one of the Okanagan’s wineries.
Her cooking experience comes from feeding her three kids, she says. She’s decided to make her signature recipe for the audition: her lasagna.
“It’s been a staple of my life since I was very small,” she said. “When it was my birthday my mom would ask what I wanted and it was always lasagna.”
She said it gave her confidence because it was the first meal she remembers making for her family as a young woman.
Now, she makes her own pasta sheets from scratch and her own ricotta cheese. She gives it a twist by using pork instead of beef and finishes it off by adding parmesan, romano, asiago and mozzarella.
“You can’t go wrong when you put five cheeses into anything,” she laughed.
For her audition, she’s plating it on her grandmother’s vintage china.
She’s heading to downtown Vancouver at 8 a.m. sharp Tuesday morning to let the taste testers try it. But she isn’t allowed to heat it up or cook it onsite, so she’s making it on Monday.
She thinks if the judges like it, she’ll get the opportunity for an on-camera audition.
