New Year....Updated Blog

Greetings! I wanted to say Happy New Year but as I write this it is mid-February and it feels a bit late to be commenting on the new year. For those who have been following me, you may have noticed I've been a little quiet on my blog and social media since the start of the new year.

Now that I'm 6 months into being a full-time personal chef, I feel like I'm ready to provide a bit more focus and try to help readers as I do when I work with my clients as a Personal Chef. If you want to learn more about what a Personal Chef does, see my earlier blog post.

What I offer my clients helps with the "chore" of meal planning, grocery shopping, preparation, cooking, and clean up. Whether you think all or part of this process is a "chore" might be different based on your cooking skills, available time, or stage in life. I personally have been working on this challenge for years.

When I was in my last years of college, I lived with a friend. We sometimes "cooked" together (really meaning frozen pizzas or macaroni and cheese) but most often, we ordered/ate out. When I graduated and moved into an apartment by myself, I realized I couldn't continue to eat that way and needed to start cooking.

Back then, there wasn't an abundance of information on the internet yet. I only had cookbooks to teach me how to put meals together and I had to figure out on my own how to cook for one person. Later, I moved in with my boyfriend and needed to start cooking for two. Jobs changed and I started traveling 4-5 days a week and cooking happened less frequently due to time/energy. Now that I'm older, I realize I can't eat like I did when I was 20 and it's important to me to eat healthier, locally, as unprocessed as possible, and with less food waste.

These days, there are diets with their own food telling you what to eat when, meal kits that bring food to your door, and many websites sharing recipes. Even though there's more information available to us, it still takes a lot of time and learning to figure out how to do this for yourself every day and how to adapt as life changes.

This is why I wanted to become a Personal Chef. In addition to saving you time, if you need to learn basic cooking methods and recipes or don't want to constantly buy too much food that you're throwing away most of it, a Personal Chef can work with you to build your skills and help you learn more about what you like/don't like to eat as well as where your food comes from.

So, I want to change the focus of my blog going forward to provide help for those who are really wanting to tackle their menu planning on their own. This might be a pretty big challenge, but I think it's the perfect challenge. I will continue to share recipes and things like gardening tips but I will also try to provide some of the glue that brings all of this together to help you tackle the "chore" of meal planning, shopping, preparation, cooking, and clean up no matter if you are starting out on your own for the first time, building your family, or addressing health concerns.

So, stay tuned. This will be fun to work together!