A Taste of Excellence with Head Chef Kelly O’Connell: Introducing Our New Autumn Winter Menus

We’ve recently launched our new Autumn Winter Menu and ahead of the launch, we sat down with Kelly O’Connell, the Executive Chef at Big Sky Studios, to discuss her inspirations behind the menu, what it means to her to be a chef, what sets Big Sky Catering apart from the rest, and her commitment to sustainability.

Q: Please can you tell us a bit about the new Autumn/Winter menu at Big Sky?

Kelly: I’m really proud and excited to launch our new autumn and winter menu here at Big Sky. 

It is the culmination of a lot of hard work between myself and all of the team here to work together across eight different menus that span eight different cuisines from Japanese to Middle Eastern, to offer a wide variety to our clients.

Q: What is your favourite dish on the menu?

Kelly:  My favourite dish is our Okonomiyaki Japanese omelette.

It's a tasty Japanese omelette, or pancake, that we use and dress with Okonomiyaki sauce, Kewpie mayonnaise, and a lot of different nori seaweed and cabbages -  it’s absolutely delicious.

Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the commitment to sustainability you have?

Kelly: As we all know, sustainability is a hugely important issue to be considered when you’re designing menus. 

Seasonality is really important as seasonal produce is there in abundance and that's why we should be using it - we make sure that all of our menus are designed around this factor. 

On top of this, we're very good at following our recipes here to the nth degree so that we do not have so many leftovers for waste and we also use this food for our team.

It’s also really important for us to use local produce. Buying local produce means we have less impact on the environment in terms of carbon emissions and we’re also putting money back into our local communities and local farmers who hold our key values. 

Since we’ve introduced beef back onto our menu, we are trying to use a local farmer at the moment called Grassroots - they are all about regenerative farming and being carbon neutral and their carbon footprint is 50% less than the rest of the UK. 
 

Q: What sets Big Sky Catering apart?

Kelly: What I believe sets us apart here at Big Sky in terms of our food and our recipes is a combination of the use of old familiar favourites with fresh new innovative recipes and designs that have been developed directly between myself and our Head Chef. 

We have looked at what the clients want, but also what we know works well, together with the use of sustainable ingredients and fun new ideas.

Q: What inspires you as a chef?

Kelly: I've always been very proud to be a chef. If you think about it, no matter where you are in the world, no matter what culture it is, people sit around a table together as a family and as friends to celebrate special moments and that's usually around food around a meal. 

So it's always been very important to me that I can be part of facilitating that in so many different ways. 

That can be as much birthday party celebrations and events, which we at Big Sky are looking to do more and more so in the future, but it can also be just day to day when you're working really hard and can enjoy a moment during the middle of the day to sit down and enjoy a meal that sustains you and makes you feel good about yourself. 

That’s really important to me and, I believe, is really important to our clients.
 

Discover a sample menu here.

To learn more about Big Sky Catering, email [email protected]