Tag: Dinner Parties

Pleasure Cooking

Far too often we get caught up in the necessity of cooking in order to eat and forget the absolute joy that can be found through the act of cooking. Of course this isn’t limited to stovetop cooking. There are many men and women around the world who find baking to be an extremely pleasurable pastime in addition to traditional stovetop cooking or even barbecuing on a grill. The main distinction occurs in how you perceive your cooking projects.

How Do Your View Cooking?

While this question is asked somewhat rhetorically, it is a question you should ask yourself and answer. Do you view cooking as a chore or duty or do you view it as a project? There is something much more exciting about embarking on a new project than getting around to a loathsome chore. If you do view cooking as a chore the more important question might be why?

Some common reasons that people dislike cooking include the following: lack of skill, lack of confidence, boredom, or you could simply dislike the inevitable clean up far more than you enjoy the process of cooking. For each of these, there are solutions if you are willing to make the effort.

A lack of skill when it comes to cooking can be easily corrected in most cases by taking a few cooking classes. Classes are offered for varying degrees of skill sets and are meant to help you develop your cooking talents while teaching you the basics of meal planning and preparation. You can increase your skills by taking more classes down the road.

While a lack of confidence is a little more difficult to address having a few ‘dinner parties’ in which your quests can compliment your culinary talents can often solve this particular dilemma. The key in this process is to plan your menu carefully and remain well within your comfort zone. You will be amazed at the wonderfully rich and delicious meals that can be prepared with very little effort if you are willing to sift through the recipe books in order to find them.

Boredom in the kitchen is perhaps one of the easiest problems to fix there is. The solution is exceedingly simple-find a challenge. Try cooking Thai or Indian cuisine. Try more difficult recipes. Try making only meals from scratch or simply try broadening your use of spices and seasonings. There are many things you can do in order to bring some excitement back into your kitchen. You may even discover hidden talents and tastes in the process.

There will always be clean up. My suggestion is to make a deal with either your partner or your children and they can draw straws over who cleans up. Of course if this won’t work in your family, you could always turn over a new leaf and clean as you go whenever possible. This makes the clean up process after dinner so much simpler to handle that it is well worth a few extra minutes during meal prep.

Cooking for pleasure is really the only way to cook. If you have difficulties when it comes to finding the enjoyment and entertainment value of cooking, perhaps it’s time you bring some fun back into your kitchen. If you’re barbecuing, put on some Jimmy Buffet and dance around your kitchen. If you’re cooking Italian find some nice Italian music to set the mood. Bring the fun back into your kitchen and you will find that cooking is a pleasure rather than a chore.

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The Factors of How to Become a Personal Chef

You might have encountered a survey asking teenagers of what they want to hire in case they have excess money to spend on luxuries. Many answered- a personal chef.

This survey only recognizes the want of people to have people pampering them with palatable foods and delectable menus. And who would not want some leisure, right?

A personal chef is someone who prepares and cooks food specifically for a person who has hired him. It may either be for some special occasions only but other people, who have the many enough, may even hire professional chefs, for the leisure of fine dining right at their houses.

Personal chefs could be compared to old maids who have learned to perfect numerous menus to serve their house. The difference however is that professional chefs have formal education and have attended formal classes and therefore, practical applications of whatever programs they have chose dot attend. Also, personal chefs are hired and are paid according to the degree of mastery they have. But that is difficult to measure really that’s why it is best that they are paid according to the dictates of the present career value and several other factors.

Personal chefs are undoubtedly the personal choices of the clients who hired them. They have the pleasure of preparing and making menus that would suit the tastes of the people they cook for. This is why it is vital that both the chef and the client have some degree of connection when it comes to taste and food choices.

Often, people interchange the jobs of personal chefs and caterers. There are main differences and we would site portions of them here.

For one, caterers are most likely businesspeople who are hired to create beverages, food and service functions on events ranging from intimate family dinner to weddings, parties and conferences. Personal chefs, on the other hand, are paid to cook meals for individual families and in-home food services for dinner parties.

Apart from what we have mentioned here, there are other several factors that determine an excellent personal chef from that of a not-so-good one.

Personal taste
We have earlier mentioned that to be able to satisfy the needs of the client’s taste buds, the personal chef and the client must have some degree of connection in terms of food choices. This might be quite hard to find and it is practically the reason why there are too many occasions where clients change their personal chefs.

Diversity of knowledge
Maybe you like a particular cuisine or maybe you like a particular way of preparing and presenting food. But fixation on a specific cuisine may not be too healthy for both the client and the personal chefs. The knowledge on food diversity is crucial since this would likely give better options for both parties. Therefore, the personal chef must be able to practice and perform several types of cuisines that would satisfy the need for multiplicity of meal choices.

Attitude
Apart from taste for fine foods, creativity and hygiene, you also need people skills. Whether you like the idea or not, you have to sell yourself to people. To make people recognize your potentiality of giving services to them and your credibility on satisfying their need for well-prepared food. This is why it is important that you practice good attitude towards your client and your assistants.