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Jennifer Evans has been keeping herself busy since winning the 2012 season of My Kitchen Rules with her friend Leigh Sexton. In addition to becoming a mum to three-month-old Harlow, Jennifer has set up a charity for underprivileged children and launched her own unique range of Thai pastes made from ingredients sourced from rural growers in Thailand.
Dubbed the cooking show’s ‘princess’, Jennifer Evans has spent months in the crop fields on the outskirts of Bangkok sourcing the best fresh ingredients for Jennifer’s Kitchen, a range of Thai pastes created to replicate the dishes she remembers as a child.
Jennifer says “I wanted to ensure I used growers that I personally knew. The quality of the ingredients is what allows our pastes to have such an intensity to them, so it’s vital to know where they’re coming from, and it’s of course really important to me to pay homage to my family.”
The new range features five varieties of Thai paste: Real Panang Curry Paste, Real Mussaman Curry Paste, Real Red Curry Paste and Real Green Curry Paste. Jennifer is currently working on extending her range to include a Sriracha chili sauce.
10% of all profits from sales of Jennifer’s Kitchen products will be donated to Give Us a Future, a charity that Jennifer Evans is setting up to help underprivileged children in Thailand. One of the charity’s first projects is to aid disadvantaged children in Samut Prakan, a village near where Jennifer grew up in Bangkok, before moving to Australia at the age of 17.
Jennifer says her most important role model is her mother, who worked tirelessly to provide her with a good education in Australia.
“As a young teenager, she did most of the cooking so her mother could work to provide the basics for the family, so she only went to school in the morning and spent all afternoon going to the market and then making curry paste from scratch,” said Jennifer. “Getting her seal of approval has been very rewarding.”
Jennifer’s business philosophy is simple – source natural hand-grown ingredients from growers she knows by name, and create quality products which other keen foodies can then turn into their own winning dishes.
Jennifer’s Kitchen products will be available to buy in gourmet delis and major supermarkets from early 2013.
For more information visit the website: www.jenniferskitchen.com.au
