My nomination was put forward by the Center for Women & Enterprise, and organization near and dear to me and familiar to basically anyone who’s ever talked to me about starting a business.  Their mission is to provide opportunities for women entrepreneurs and women in business to increase professional success, personal growth, and financial independence.

As many of you know, when I was contemplating starting my business way back when (2004 or so), I completed a business plan workshop with the CWE.  Over the years since then, I’ve benefitted from so many of their programs and resources, and I love giving back by helping budding entrepreneurs as well.  If you’re thinking about starting a business, definitely check them out – get on their mailing list to stay up to date about the many free and very affordable classes, conferences, workshops and other services.

(And if you’re thinking of starting a personal chef business – check out my ebook too! “Cook for a Living: Becoming a Personal Chef” is on sale now, right here.)

I’m looking forward to learning more about the other nominees, both in Massachusetts and across the country.  You can participate too through this free, 3-Day Virtual Conference during National Small Business Week.  There will be sessions on everything from email marketing and social media, to managing finances, dealing with customer complaints, and how pop-up shops can help your brand.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on my acceptance speech

The post SBA Small Business Awards – featuring ME! appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.

Their “Keep It or Toss It?” engine lets you type in a food and find out how long it should stay fresh in the fridge or freezer – and, most importantly for personal chefs, it differentiates between raw and cooked foods, which many other resources like this don’t.  For instance, I typed in “pork tenderloin” (I’m plagued by spoiled pork) and found that all cuts of pork will stay at their best quality when frozen raw for 4-6 months, but once cooked, are best eaten within 2-3 months.   (And it always notes that food properly stored at 0 degrees Fahrenheit will keep indefinitely, in terms of being safe to eat – it’s the taste and/or texture that will suffer past the recommended dates.)

Another cool thing:  the “Your Questions Answered” section, where it addresses such often-pondered questions like “Can You Safely Drink Milk After the Sell-By Date?” (sure, for up to a week usually) and “I Left Pizza Out Overnight – Is It Still Safe to Eat?”  (they say no; I say yes provided you sizzle the hell out of it in a covered skillet til it has reached 165 degrees to kill off any nasties…or maybe I just hate wasting pizza, and having never had food poisoning am willing to risk it – until I get food poisoning, after which I’m sure I’ll change my tune.)  They source their data mostly from US government sources, research studies and food manufacturers, and they do a nice job of balancing an abundance of caution with a healthy dose of common sense.

For personal chefs, this expiration date info is great to point clients to, in case they have questions about the expiration dates on meals you prepared eons ago that they’ve just discovered in their freezer. And the “3 Ways to Defrost Food Safely” is worth referencing too, so they know it’s not just you telling them the best way to thaw meals is overnight in the fridge.  (And I guarantee that food-obsessed people will be unable to tear themselves away from the site without reading the entire “Your Questions Answered” section.)

The post Do food expiration dates matter? appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.

Look no further – your roadmap is here!

Cook for A Living: Becoming a Personal Chef

is my brand-new ebook, based on my 12+ years of experience as a successful personal chef and teacher, consultant and mentor to many others.

Buy the book!

In this easy-to-read, 40-page guide, you’ll learn:

• The skills and training you need to be a personal chef
• What to do first (well, second. First, buy my book!)
• How to find and follow your state & local regulations
• How to choose a name and business entity
• Ways to handle your bookkeeping
• What about insurance?
• Pricing is everything  – how the heck do you know what you’re worth? (Hint: a lot)
• How to find clients (and not go broke giving discounts to friends and family!)
• Marketing to get your new business off the ground

and the proverbial much, much more!

I’ve been at this game a long time – since 2004 – and I still love it.  I mean LOVE love it, like I whistle while I work, smile on my way out the door and thank my lucky stars that I get paid to do something fun, special, creative, productive, and delicious. Let me tell you how, so you can love your work too!

Cook for A Living: Becoming a Personal Chef

is a 40 page PDF, easy to download and quick to read on any device.

Your future is waiting – buy the book today!

Buy the book!

(Clicking the “buy” link will let you securely purchase the ebook. Once your purchase is complete, a link will be emailed to you to download the PDF. Thanks for your interest!)

The post Want to be a personal chef? My new ebook tells you how! appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.

So you want to make dinner rolls or conrbread as a side dish for a client entree, and you’re standing in the grocery store wondering if they have flour, cornmeal, baking powder etc.  Or you know you bought a big bag of brown rice on your first cook date with them, but don’t recall if you’ve used it all yet…do you go ahead and buy it, knowing you might be overbuying, or risk gong without and finding out you did in fact need it?  One of the many daily conundrums facing a busy personal chef…

Some chefs keep very detailed records of the items in their clients’ pantries, and I applaud this, while finding it completely impractical for me    Just keeping track of where I wrote it down, or making sure to find extra time in every cook date to do an update are things that  I find challenging.  (I did try doing this several years ago but gave up after I seemed to never note the things I had real questions about.)

So what do I do now?  I use the nifty Voice Memos app on my iPhone to leave myself little updates as I go thru the cookdate.  (There are undoubtedly many other similar 3rd party apps out there for all smartphones – just check the app store of you choosing.)  The cool thing about Voice Memos is that you can pause it and resume later – helpful when you want to keep one recording snippet for the whole cookdate (although, tragically, you can’t keep a recording on pause and use the iPod functions at the same time, so if you listen to music or podcasts while cooking like I do,  you have to make a separate recording if you need to add something to your reminder.)

Given the state of my memory, usually what I do is towards the end of the cookdate, I hit record and start talking to myself…”grab a new large bottle of olive oil next time…they have all sorts of rice and pasta so no need to buy any the next couple of times…pick up some Glad Press-N-Seal.”   Then, I hit the Share button and email the snippet to myself with the client name and date in the Subject line.  Next time I’m shopping for that client, I bring up the snippet, and there you have it – you, telling yourself what to do.  (Sometimes I also tell myself jokes to see if I’ll laugh when I hear them again, but mostly I think I laugh at the fact that I’m trying to make myself laugh.)

Happy Cooking!

—

Chefchick Says: A damp towel or a few wet paper towel sheets under your cutting board keeps it from slipping – and if you use the color-coded thin plastic cutting sheets, it makes for a much better “knife feel” under your blade.

The post Hmmm, do I need to buy flour? appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.

There are SO many ways to come up with ideas to add to your recipe files:

• Websites
• Cookbooks
• Pinterest
• Magazines
• Instagram
• Newspaper food sections
• Professional (i.e magazine or cooking show) newsletters (These can be a great source of inspiration; I rarely use the recipes, but entire editorial teams have spent time thinking about what ingredients are fresh and seasonal and are great for cooking now; take advantage of that!)

When you’re looking through your resources, have your clients in mind.  When I go through a stack of cooking magazines, I tear out pages and drop them in piles by client – these clients might like these vegetarian dishes; my Paleos would love this curry, etc.  You can put sticky notes in cookbooks; bookmark web-based recipes (use a tool like EverNote, Delicious, Google Bookmarks, etc); or build Pinterest boards, by client or recipe type (chicken dishes, vegetarian, soups, freezable, fish, etc).

With ideas in hand, I create a list for each client and send them via email. For a client who gets 3 meals prepared, I’ll probably send 6 or 8 ideas.  Not too many, as too many choices can be overwhelming.  But not too few, or they may not have enough to choose from. And always offer to send more if they need them.

I used to dread menu planning in my early days, but now I really enjoy it.  Perhaps back then it felt overwhelming, trying to choose something justright for everyone.  But like anything, it gets a lot easier with practice.  Now it’s one of my favorite parts of my business, because I get to sit and think about what they need, what’s in season, what I like making, how I can help them…it feels really personal and like I’m making a connection with them through nutritious, delicious, nurturing meals – hands down, the best part of being a personal chef.

Got any favorite ways to collect and store recipes and manage your menu planning?  I’d love to hear them!

The post For Personal Chefs: Menu Planning For Clients appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.

Early this year I came upon a solution that works really well for me and I highly recommend: a smartphone app called Line2.   For $100 a year, I was able to port the same phone number I’ve been using since I started my business over to Line2, which rings on my cell phone whenever I get a call.  It uses Wifi when available (excellent call quality) and 3G/4G/LTE when it’s not. By leaving the app open on my phone (it eats up very little battery juice), whenever someone calls me the app pops up a notification that lets me answer the call or send it to voicemail.  Importantly for me, it is apparent that the call is to my business line – it’s not the same as call forwarding where you forward a business number to your personal cell phone, so you can’t tell when it rings there that it’s a business call. By adding my contacts to the Line2 app, I can see if it’s a client calling.   I usually let the call go to voice mail if I don’t recognize the number, and then I can immediately listen to the message to see if it’s someone I want to call back.  If it’s a spam call, I can block it from ever calling me again.  And I can get an email with a link to the message if I choose, which I like as a backup reminder to check the message later if I’m too busy to do it when the call comes in.  (See my initial problem with timeliness-of-message-checking, above.)

There may be other services like it, but Line2 suits my needs perfectly and has excellent customer service to boot.  They answered my questions beforehand (including definite confirmation that my number could be ported), walked me through setup, conducted test calls with me, and let me do a free 7-day trial to ensure it worked the way I hoped. Check them out if you’re in the market!

The post Alternatives to Using Your Personal Mobile Number for Business appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.

Kicking off 2017 with a quick gear rundown. Over the years I have definitely trimmed down  the amount of gear I carry with me to my clients’ homes on cookdates, but there are still some items that I consider essential.  Some are very useful; others are just a real pain to work around if you can’t find one in the client’s kitchen (I’m looking at you, potato masher). The short list:

• My knives
• My favorite wood & silicone spatulas
• Vegetable peeler and brush (everyone has a peeler; they are usually very dull/worthless)
• Corkscrew (digging the cork out of a bottle of wine for a great beef bourguignon without one is a giant pain)
• The aforementioned potato masher (lately considering swapping it out for my ricer, but that is much heavier…)
• Half a dozen sheet pans, for roasting and cooling
• Small fan for cooling food
• Grease spatter guard – minimizes mess when searing and frying
• My Squish collapsible bowl

The Squish bowl is a great addition to a personal chef’s kit because it collapses down to fit much more easily among your gear. Here’s my 5 quart Squish bowl, unSquished:

It’s big enough for mixing up all sorts of things – meatloaf, meatballs, crab cakes, all manner of doughs and batters…

And here it is, squished:

It collapses down to about 2 1/2″, and slides neatly into the bag where I carry my sheet pans and spatter guard.

I got mine here at Amazon; definitely worth checking out for a very portable option!

The post Gear Guide: My Favorite Bowl appeared first on TaylorMade Meals.