FREEMAN CATHERINE SLOMAN WAS DELIGHTED TO JOIN THE STATIONERS’ COMPANY IN SUMMER 2024.
7 OCTOBER 2024
Catherine is a cookery writer, culinary educator, author of Kitchen Confidence cook book and advocate for good food and getting people of all ages and abilities in the kitchen. These days Catherine teaches on a consultative basis at a number of cookery schools and privately through her Kitchen Confidence Cookery School.
There’s the world famous Bread Ahead Bakery School in London (if you haven’t tried the doughnuts, pop along to one of their schools or cafés around London - you really won’t regret it…). At Bread Ahead, Catherine’s main focus is on developing and delivering an ongoing programme of seasonal culinary workshops, with accompanying recipe books. She gets to wander round Borough Market, seeing what produce is on offer, and develops classes around those ingredients. And she delivers some of the “bread and butter”, as it were, bakery classes at the schools in Borough Market and Wembley.
Sometimes Catherine hops on the ferry over to Ireland to teach at the prestigious Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Ireland. She took herself off for a sabbatical one time and immersed herself in their 12 week certificate course. It was a shock to the system, taking exams again after a very long break from that sort of thing, but it was a wonderful experience and led to her being invited back to join the teaching team there. She’s just back from a summer at the school - very different from working in London. In Cork, Catherine lives in a rural idyll, far removed from the cut and thrust of city life. Living on or near the Ballymaloe organic farm, teaching a diverse range of students a packed programme of techniques and skill, and eating the best quality ingredients - what’s not to like about that?
Catherine delivers a bakery masterclass at the Luminary Bakery social enterprise in London. Luminary is a social enterprise offering an employability programme for women with multiple disadvantages, helping them to build a future for themselves. Baking is used as a tool to equip women with transferable skills for the working world and empowering women to build a career. It’s inspiring to see how these women embrace the opportunity to change their lives for the better and to be a small part of that process.
Before becoming obsessed with food, Catherine was a lawyer (criminal and family) - a career path that she meandered into from a spell working as a reporter on a local paper in Greater Manchester (she was tired after completing her law degree…) She also spent a bit of time working for a law publisher and never wants to read a tax law report again!
Catherine is Vice President of LDE London (the London Chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier International), a philanthropic and dynamic group of forward thinking and successful female leaders in the food, beverage and hospitality industries. She’s also a judge on the Guild of Fine Foods Great Taste Awards.
So definitely obsessed with food!