Rachel McSweeney

Hometown	WA
Age	45
Occupation	Office Administrator
Statistics
Mystery Box(es) Won	1
Team Challenge(s) Won	4
Pressure Test(s) Survived	1
Bottom Entries	2
Placement	16th

Rachel McSweeney is a contestant on MasterChef Australia Season 3. She is placed 16th.

Biography

Retrieved from masterchef.com.au

As a miner’s wife, mum-of-three Rachel has spent a lot of her life living in some of the most remote Outback areas in Australia.

Forget about popping down to the supermarket for fresh produce, let alone fancy restaurants; Rachel’s cooking experience has been one giant mystery box.

“In remote areas, you get limited access to food and a big delivery of produce has to last you six weeks,” says Rachel, who has been married to her miner husband Kevin for 21 year supplies, all I’d have left is mince so I guess it really was my own mystery box. Mind you, in one place, we did live next door to an emu farm!”Rachel, Kevin and their three children have lived at various mine sites in Outback Australia but after the birth of Cameron the family decided to set up home in Perth. Kevin is now a fly-in, fly-out mine engineer.

The move to Perth not only allowed Rachel to spend her days free of brown snakes, scorpions and poisonous centipedes but an opportunity to fall back in love with cooking.

“I have always loved cooking and being in the kitchen,” says Rachel. “It has always made me feel as though I am contributing. It’s the perfect way to show that you care for people, that you love them.”

Cooking appears to take Rachel back to her childhood, filling her with happy memories of being in the kitchen with her mum Miriam – who died in 2008 – while serving up dinner for her three siblings.

“Mum was a physio who worked long hours so when I was about 10 she would get out the ingredients for dinner in the morning, and I would cook the meal or peel the vegies after school, and we would dish it all up at dinner.

I loved it,” she smiles. “I was very close to my mother. She lived next door, and she was my major inspiration. The one thing I learnt from mum is that a person full of good food, is a happy person.”

Rachel hopes that being a mum pays dividends in the MasterChef kitchen.

“When you cook for kids, it gets a bit boring if you cook the same thing all the time, plus you have to learn to economise food,” says Rachel, who names Jamie Oliver as her favourite chef. “My kids were fussy eaters when they were younger – they wouldn’t eat vegies so I’d have to get quite crafty at hiding vegetables in their food.

“The other advantage I hope I have is age. I come from an era where you had to do home economics at school and we were taught the basics of cooking like baking scones.”

Trivia

• At 45, she & Cleo are the oldest women of the season.