Jasmine Stewart is one face and name that you may remember from Season 5 of the hit television show, MasterChef Junior. One day, this talented chef wants to be just like chef Bobby Flay, “definitely going into cooking when [she] gets older,” but in the interim, she’s taking on a new task-helping to revamp the kid’s menu for Great Wolf Lodge Resorts.
“They were focused on revamping the kid’s menu,” Stewart says in an interview with Black Enterprise. “We definitely think that kids have a wider palate and want more variety.”
The resort approached Stewart, in addition to 15-year-old chef Logan Guleff, 11-and-9-year-old daughters of Chef Geoffrey Zakarian, in addition to sons of celebrity chef Graham Eliot, to be a part of the Great Wolf Lodge’s Junior Chef Council. The JCC revised menu will debut in September.
“We have all been asked to come up with two dishes—one dish that kids could recognize might be chicken nuggets or mac and cheese,” Jasmine explains in her interview. But, she also states that she and the other young chefs will not be afraid to get kids to push their culinary palates to another level, encouraging them to try something new.
So just where did Stewart get her culinary passion? Well, it was inherited. “I learned through my parents. They both have unique and different palates. My dad is from Jamaica and my mom is from Virginia. I asked them if they could teach me the basics. I started making eggs and moved onto pancakes and cupcakes,” she told Black Enterprise. “Then I ended up getting into [cooking] as a hobby. The more you practice the more you learn.”
It definitely looks like a trip to one of the 17 Great Wolf Lodge locations throughout the United States is in order just to sample what Stewart has come up with.
