Working horrendously long hours as a lawyer, Claire would often come home exhausted and disillusioned, dreaming of the day she could open a small gourmet café attached to a winery.

While her head was buried in a pile of legal documents in the wee hours of the morning in her role as a construction and major projects lawyer, she decided that enough was enough: she applied for the second series of MasterChef Australia.

Ever since she was a child and helped her grandmother prepare family feasts, Claire has come to realise that cooking makes her feel special.

“It was the one chore I actually enjoyed!” laughs Claire. “I made a big thing of helping out in the kitchen because I loved it. My love affair with food started in earnest as soon as I had finished school and suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands.”

She bought her first cookbook – The River Café Cook Book – at age 17 and cooked her way through every recipe. But she really got the foodie bug at 18-years-old when she deferred her first year university studies to travel to Europe, and enrolled into a cooking course.

“I went overseas and took myself off to Le Cordon Bleu for a month,” explains Claire. “I’d done a fair bit of travel in Asia but travelling Europe was a turning point for me and having that month learning the basics of cooking was the moment that I started to become really serious about it.”

Returning to her Melbourne home, where she lived with her parents and younger sister, Claire suppressed her passionate feelings for cooking to follow through with her law studies.

“I made a conscious choice at that point that I wanted to keep cooking as a passion,” she says. “I was scared that if I did it as a job, then it would become a slog and I’d end up hating it. But I now know that as time goes on, you’re better off following a career you’re absolutely passionate about, rather than doing something that you like but don’t love. Life is too short.”

She is now determined cooking will now play a major part of any new career path she chooses.

“Long term I want to write about food,” she says, naming Stephanie Alexander as her favourite chef and admitting she has a “slight crush” on Neil Perry. “But I think you can’t do that without real authority, so I’d like to work as a chef and learn skills, and maybe have my own café as well.

“The food dream is to own a little café next to a winery selling local produce that’s cooked really well – not pretentious or anything fancy.”