Professional Chef Plans Culinary Classes in Townsend
 | Author:
Nancy Marks, Reporter
Nancy Marks: MT43 News Secretary and News Editor |
Professional Chef Plans Culinary Classes in Townsend
Nancy Marks
Reporter
Townsend community cooks and lovers of good food are moving up in the world.
They can learn the fine art of good cooking from professional chef Heather Hatwan who has opened cooking classes and is taking catering reservations.
This June Heather had a vision while driving back from Mitchell, South Dakota following her mother’s death. She decided what she really wanted was to teach cooking. She recently built a website for her new business, Big Sky Culinary Classes, LLC.
Couples or families can sign up for classes in their homes. Heather brings all the equipment and supplies, teaches the class and while the family or guests enjoy the meal she does the cleanup. She will offer five different menus to choose from. “The class will be 100 percent hands-on: participants will learn knife skills, food safety and food sourcing,” she said, “plus it’s a fun night for the group.”
Heather stressed the size of the class depends on the person’s kitchen size. “Six people is an ideal size, but depending on the kitchen, we can take more as long as everyone has elbow room,” she emphasized.
Heather is partnering with the Science, Technology, Outdoor activity, Knowledge and Entrepreneurship (STOKE) nonprofit and will be using the Lodge’s commercial kitchen to help teach STOKE students about cooking. Beginning next year she hopes to work with the Broadwater High School to teach classes there.
Heather (whose name Hatwan is Hungarian) began her love of cooking early. She came from a large family of seven in Mitchell and went to work in a restaurant at an early age. Her love of cooking evolved from there. She worked in two restaurants for ten years in Colorado and Alaska.
Heather, who is licensed and certified to teach cooking, eventually began mentoring restaurant owners who had struggled to stay in business during COVID. She aided owners of six restaurants in rebuilding their businesses in the last three years including the iconic Montana Club in Helena. “Every owner or chef has a vision of what they see as their restaurant’s special draw. My job was to help them execute that vision,” she explained.
She worked from the bottom up to reinstate each restaurant’s success: she redesigned kitchens, she found new or local food sources and she worked on new recipes that reflected the food specialties of the area.
Most of her food sources will come from the Bozeman Food Cooperative, but Heather is very interested in building recipes and menus around wild game caught by Broadwater County’s hunters. She can cater dinners for up to 75 people and will begin taking reservations for Christmas for those interested.
Please contact Heather at bigskyculinaryclasses@gmail.com or call her at (303) 406-1501.
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PhotoCredit: Photo Credits: Heather Hatwan
Image 1 Caption: Heather Hatwan
Photo Credits: Heather Hatwan
