Pit's Kitchen
Pitsinee Chaisarn’s reason for starting a catering business is a belief that a healthy life starts with healthy eating.
She was dissatisfied about the quality of many mass-produced foods, and prefers to use mainly organic, preservative free and free-range ingredients to cater for all clients (and family members) with specific allergies. The satisfaction for Pit is the wonderful customer feedback, word-of-mouth promotion and many repeat clients.
Flavour and presentation differentiate Pit’s food from others and that is what Pit’s Kitchen reputation has grown on. Pit believes food is for the eyes and soul as well as for nourishment. She is a big believer in conscious living and conscious cooking and has been practising living plastic-free (as much as possible) for some time now.
After growing up in northern Thailand, Pit studied advertising and languages in Bangkok before training with United Airlines in Chicago. She flew with United for several years, based mainly in Asia, then left the airline industry (post 9/11) and moved to Sydney, Australia. Her training and experiences while working for United included customer service, styling and health and safety which naturally led Pit into the hospitality industry in Australia, where she worked for a number of hotels, restaurants, catering and events management businesses.
Moving to Auckland in 2005 with her now husband, Kevin, Pit’s early years here were taken up raising two boys. This created a different culinary challenge as ‘family food’ was different from the predominantly Asian fusion restaurant style dishes Pit had specialised in. At that stage baked goods were bought rather than made however, after an SOS call to Pit’s mother-in-law, an Edmond’s Cook Book duly arrived in the mail and this started Pit on the road to mastering baking skills, which she quickly learnt to adapt to suit her eldest son's food allergies.
At home Pit mainly cooks vegetarian meals for her family but includes meat and seafood as long as it's fresh, free-range and locally sourced. She makes her own nut and seed milk to replace commercial options but mainly to provide allergy free choices for her family.
Pit’s early experimentation included cooking by mixing flavours. She used healthy ingredients to replace traditional ingredients, spending hours in the kitchen to perfect the flavours yet maintain nourishment. Entertaining was trialled on groups of friends who were very effusive in their praise and started asking Pit to cater their private parties. Friends then started encouraging Pit to start a catering/hospitality business.
In the meantime, Pit and her family had been enjoying summers and other holidays at their holiday house in Mangawhai Heads. In late 2012 Pit and Kevin decided to have a change of lifestyle and to trial living at the coast permanently. That move led Pit to establishing Pit’s Kitchen as a higher-end wholefood and free-range catering and food experience business during 2013. Starting with healthy school lunches and catering for community events around Mangawhai, Pit quickly gained a reputation for her flavours, healthy food combinations and presentation.
Pit early on favoured fresh, local and where possible organic and free-range produce, and in that regard hit the jackpot living in Mangawhai and its surrounding area where there are wonderful organic farms and orchards to choose from.
Today Pit’s Kitchen is a thriving catering business that includes networking and couples cooking night and ‘Eat and Retreat’ accommodation. Pit’s food stands out with her flavours as well as presentation and caters to all clients with a food intolerance. Organic and free-range local produce is preferred - it must be fresh and seasonal and preservative free.
Courtesy of Junction Magazine www.junctionmag.co.nz
