One Smokin’ Kitchen
BY JOHN CLAUSENKaren Conley is sitting in her Flat Rock home, surrounded by her three greyhounds and talking about the time she spends cooking…in her garage.
Sure, she has a normal home kitchen with all the usual equipment and gadgets, but the real cooking gets done in the fully coded and inspected commercial kitchen she’s had built in her garage.
Karen, the owner of Cuisine Team catering company, has been cooking professionally for 21 years, ever since she graduated from Manhattan’s New York Restaurant School. At first, she did her catering almost as a hobby, working relatively short hours and having a bit of fun. Now, however, she’s spending as many as ten hours per day in her commercial kitchen preparing feasts for clients from Kenmure, Champion Hills, Flat Rock and other upscale neighborhoods. Last holiday season, she did 32 catering jobs in December alone. She’s been seriously involved in catering since 1996.
“I got divorced,” she says, “and I had to make a living.” This was not as drastic as it may seem, she explains. “I started cooking for my family when I was 15 years old. My mother passed away and I had two brothers and a father who didn’t cook. In those days, real men didn’t cook.”
Once she jumped into catering full time, she spared no expense or effort to ensure her success. Her kitchen, a gleaming collection of stainless steel appliances and cooking equipment, provides work for half a dozen freelance cooks, servers, bartenders and other food pros. “It takes a couple years to train good help,” Karen says. “In this business, you’re only as good as your last job.”
Among the spotless equipment, you’ll find a six-burner Vulcan stove and oven, a Manitowoc commercial grade refrigerator and a giant Arctic Air freezer…but no mechanical dishwasher. “Altogether, I’ve probably spent five years washing dishes,” she says. The kitchen’s three stainless steel sinks are served by a 120-gallon hot water heater that produces as much as 70 gallons of hot water per hour.
Like any craftsperson or artisan, she has her favorite tools. “I have more gadgets than I could ever use, but I couldn’t survive without my Cuisinart,” she says. Another favorite tool is a hand-held slicing machine made in France.
The menu for each job depends on the wishes of the client, of course, but Karen’s range is impressive. On this particular day, she’s making a pork tenderloin in a reduced pomegranate sauce. The pork — rubbed with coriander, cumin and cinnamon — will be served to a Flat Rock client and accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes and green beans.
Despite an intense schedule, Karen does more than slave over a hot stove. Every three years or so, she and a group of adventurous friends take the 17-hour flight to Africa. The continent’s wildlife is Karen’s passion. “It’s like no other place on earth,” she says. “When I go to Africa, I feel like I’m home.”
She’s been to Kenya, South Africa and several other countries…some beautiful and tranquil, some downright frightening. Her love of the African lands is tempered by sorrow at what has happened there in the recent past. “There’s no other place like it in the world,” she repeats, “but if they don’t do something to save the animals they are going to lose the whole continent.”
Karen’s passion for Africa and for cooking can bring about some interesting cross-cultural interaction. “I talk to the chefs over there,” she says, “and sometimes I work in the kitchens with them. I haven’t put a lot of African dishes into my catering menu, but I do make some African dinners for friends.”
Those dinners include items such as pumpkin soup and watermelon salads, two very popular items in her adopted continent. She also whips up a popular African dessert: chocolate cobras, a donut-like, chocolate-covered pastry shaped like a serpent. “They’re a lot of fun,” she says. “People really like them.”Â
