‘Chopped’ champion from Fort Worth says teaching is where her heart is
Kathleen Cluchey whipped a batch of cheese biscuits made from a pumpkin cheese ball out of the oven and started scooping chili made with ground turkey and purple potatoes into bowls.
An entrée of turkey tenderloin in salsa verde and a Brussels sprout slaw followed later, topped by brown butter pecan shortbread with bourbon-apple ice cream for dessert.
The Fort Worth teacher loves to feed large groups of people, but the three-course meal she prepared last February was for a small group of judges and the kitchen was the set of a cooking television game show.
The reward for her meal? The title of Chopped Champion and $10,000.
But a title and big bucks weren’t Cluchey’s primary motivations when she auditioned for “Chopped.” She told the judges she wanted to win to show her students there’s “value in taking risks.”
Cluchey competed against three other educators from around the country in the “Chopped” Thanksgiving episode “Thankful for Teachers.” The show was filmed Feb. 1-2, 2022, in Knoxville, but didn’t air on the Food Network until Nov. 15. Cluchey had to keep the knowledge of her win a secret until then.
Looking back, Cluchey said her “Chopped” experience helped her understand her students better and allowed them see her in a different light.
“In middle school, your ideas of fame are just funny, right? And you’re trying to figure it out,” she said. “So it’s fun to see them kind of realize that and realize I’m human. And there’s one point in the show where I talked about like ‘I feel like I’m graded and now I get what my students feel when I’m passing back tests,’ and they were like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly how we feel.’”
Isla Decker, one of Cluchey’s students from Mosaic Academy, where she taught history and science last year, said she wasn’t surprised when she found out Cluchey won.
“She’s such an amazing cook that it was hard for her not to win,” the 12-year-old said. “She was too good to lose.”
Isla remembers the applesauce cake Cluchey brought to school and the way she made history come alive. She was also impressed by the courage Cluchey showed when she participated in “Chopped.”
“She’s very brave,” Isla said. “I would have been scared out of my wits to be on national television and to possibly lose in front of millions of people.”
Ruby Martin, another of Cluchey’s sixth-graders at Mosaic Academy, said the students tried to trick Cluchey into telling them how she placed on the show.
“She wouldn’t tell us if she’d like moved on past round one or anything like that,” Ruby said. “But we kept trying to ... get her to tell us, but she kept it quiet.”
Cluchey said she had a lot of time to process her “Chopped” win before it was made public and ask herself if cooking was something she wanted to go into professionally. She decided teaching is where her heart is.
“I love teaching,” Cluchey said. “Like that is where I want to be, that is what I want to do. That’s the thing I could do every day, you know, as a job. Cooking is my hobby and my stress relief.”
Cluchey’s exposure to the kitchen and winning competitions started early.
“When she was little, I always made sure she was pulling up a chair to the counter and doing what she could to either pour or stir or dump into containers. ... I always tried to make her a part of the kitchen,” said Cluchey’s mother, Marcia McLaughlin.
Cluchey won a ribbon for her biscuits at the State Fair of Texas when she was around 4 years old. McLaughlin still has a copy of the photo that was published in the Plano Star Courier.
McLaughlin said the state fair baking contest was one of the avenues she used to teach Cluchey and her two siblings to cook. They would start practicing their recipe over summer vacation and ask neighbors and the firefighters from the station across the street for their input.
Cluchey traveled extensively during college, and it was during those trips she began to branch out and realize she loved to cook as well as bake.
She bought ingredients from local markets and learned to cook Mexican dishes while on a trip around Mexico. In India she prepared dinner with women in a community kitchen.
“I learned a lot there,” she said. “So just the connection and ... experiencing the world through your senses, right, because you got taste, you have touch, you have sound. You got all of it there. And when you get to do that with people you love and for people you love, there’s just no better feeling.”
Cluchey calls the kitchen is her happy place. She transitions into dinner mode on the 15 minute drive home from Young Women’s Leadership Academy where she teaches seventh and eighth science this year.
“What do I have for dinner, what am I going to make — I have a menu posted each week — and trying to figure out like did the thing I plan ... is that actually going to happen tonight?” Cluchey said. “Did I forget something? How much time do I have to sit before I have to start moving?”
Cluchey’s household consists of her husband and their three children, her mother and her sister-in-law. In addition to cooking for her own family every night, Cluchey also cooks for another family three nights a week and a group of neighborhood friends on Wednesday.
She said advance planning, simple meals like noodle bowls and tacos and the support of her family make her busy life possible.
“I work, I come home and cook every day, but I have a lot of help,” she said. “I have a lot of support with like dishes and kids and juggling it all. I’m definitely not doing this by myself.”
McLaughlin said it’s been fun for her to watch Cluchey develop her culinary skills.
“There’s not a bad meal in it,” McLaughlin said. “And I’ve had maybe five years of poor cooking and where I’ve just kind of given up on cooking for myself. And because I didn’t want to plan it. I didn’t want to explore it. I just felt tired of doing it. And now I see that her skill set just zeroed in on this ability to feed, and I’m wanting to step into the fun of it all.”
Cluchey usually cooks alone, but she’s trying to include her kids more in the food preparation. Her 6-year-old son cooks with her sometimes and her 11-year-old daughter does a lot of baking.
After “Thankful for Teachers” aired, her daughter was inspired to try some different things. Cluchey said one weekend they bought a bag of frozen fish so her daughter could expand her skills.
“I teach and I cook and I spend time with my family and that’s all I have time for, most of what I have time for,” she said. “And I’m really happy there in that space.”
