This post is going to chronicle a typical day in my life as a personal chef. It is a long post – you may want to bear with me if you have ever wanted, or thought about hiring, a personal chef. If not, go on, read my other posts instead.

Friday 9/21, 7am: Today I am cooking for P and E. They have been my clients for a little over a year and a half now. They hired me right after their son W was born. P found my ad on Craig’s List, which was a bit unusual – the majority of my new clients are referred to me by a friend or acquaintance. P said he was impressed by that fact that I had been cooking long-term for the references he had contacted. It’s a pleasure to cook for P/E on a Friday, as they are extremely low-maintenance, which is a comforting way to end my work-week. (Not that my other clients are at all high-maintenance. No way I would last even a week with anyone that was hyper-demanding.) And, by low-maintenance, I mean that they are easy to please with my food, they are responsive to my communications, and they pay me on time.

I e-mailed P/E a suggested menu a week ahead of time. E will often leave my suggested menus intact, but for today she changed one menu item: she changed Smoked Salmon and Egg Salad to Turkey Lasagna with Spaghetti Squash. The Turkey Lasagna is one of E’s favorite dishes, and as Fall quickly approaches here in Seattle (actually, it has felt like Fall for 2 weeks now), I am drawn to making dishes with winter squashes. The other items on the menu for today are: Curried Shrimp Cakes, Chicken Adobo, Lentil and Mushroom Soup, and Quinoa Pilaf. So now, at 7am, I am off to the store to buy the food for today’s menu.

7:15am: I start my shopping at Madison Market. That is my usual routine with my clients – to start the shopping at Madison Market, then finish at Safeway. I will sometimes shop for P/E at Metropolitan Market in Lower Queen Anne, since they live on Queen Anne. However, if there are some items that I need to buy which I am not sure that Metropolitan Market stocks, then I will shop for them at Madison Market and Safeway. Since I am there all the other days of the week, I know the inventories in those stores frighteningly well. I buy all my proteins, most of my canned and pantry items, and about half the produce at Madison Market. I never ever buy meat at Safeway. Sorry, Safeway, I do respect your store, but frankly, your meat department sucks. So, I get all my chicken, turkey, beef, pork, shrimp, and whatever other meat, seafood, and fish I need from Wayne at Madison Market. He gives me a hard time whenever I ask him to skin my fish, but other than that, he goes better than 100% to do me right and to get me whatever I need. Thanks Wayne.

You might think that I would get 100% of my produce at Madison Market as well (for non-Seattleites, you should know that it is a natural foods co-op), but Brian at Safeway does a really nice job with the produce department over there. There is a new woman at Madison Market in charge of produce (sorry, I forgot your name), and she does a much better job than any of her predecessors in stocking her department. My heart leaped the day I saw here sending back several cases of fruit to her supplier when it didn’t meet her standards. So, how do I decide which produce items to buy where? It’s usually several different factors – my food budget, how particular items look that morning at Madison Market, whether or not I want to buy organic that day. If I am buying produce items that are in season, I know that I can buy quality at either store, but if I am buying non-seasonal produce, the decision is more complex.

9am: I arrive at P/E’s house on Queen Anne. I go in the back door now – I learned my lesson in June not to lug bags of groceries up their front stairs when I clumsily broke my foot on one of their steps. I go up to the kitchen and I’m immediately greeted by W, the little boy. You know how, when toddlers are learning to talk, they repeat phrases over and over? That’s W for you. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi…..He’s so cute, it puts a smile on my face for the rest of the day. I put the refrigerated items away, eat a quick breakfast bar, and I get started. The first thing I do is to identify the steps in which I need do things. One of the gifts that I have as a chef is that I can almost instantaneously prioritize my mental prep list. I might not cut or sauté quite as fast as some other chefs, but by doing this simple mental exercise at the beginning of my day, the end result is just as efficient I think. Honestly, I can’t ever remember a day when I beat myself up near the end of my cooking with an “Oh crap, I needed to do that 2 hours ago.” Today, a simple glance at what I am preparing tells me that I need to: 1) cook off the spaghetti squash for the lasagna; 2) toast the quinoa for the pilaf; 3) make the spinach ricotta for the lasagna; 4) get the soup started; and so on. Most of the prep items I do first involve getting the lasagna ready to go in the oven. Whenever I do a baked casserole dish, it is usually the first item I try to get done, since it needs a while in the oven to bake, and also because it needs a while to cool off before I can put it in the refrigerator.

I don’t want to bore you with all the prep I do to get the food done. I think the food today turns out pretty well. The lasagna and quinoa are items that I do all the time. They are also items that I created in the past, so I had no need to bring recipes with me. The soup is one that I have done often in the past, but it has been a few years since I have made it. The shrimp dish and the adobo are new items for P/E. They are very open to having me make them new and untried things, as long as they are low-fat. I normally pan-fry the shrimp cakes, but today I try oven-frying them to reduce their fat content. The oven-frying takes longer than I think it will, but it still turns out fine. In the past when I have made Chicken Adobo for other clients, I was not really happy with the dish. These other clients said that they liked it, but I wanted to try a new recipe. So, today, I tried a recipe out of a Philippine cookbook that I checked out from the library. It seems to have turned out well; I liked the addition of fresh pineapple and tomatoes. If P/E end up not liking it, they will hopefully tell me so. They are pretty good at giving me feedback, positive and negative, which is another reason why they are favored clients.

12:45pm: The cooking is done, and now the cleanup starts. Cleanup is my least favorite part of the day. Shocking, I know. When I work out at the catering company, I hand dishes off to the dishwasher. Today, I’m the kitchen bitch. Still, even though I prefer to spend my time cooking, not cleaning, the cleanup is a required part of my day, so I bear it out by daydreaming. It’s not as though I can destroy (figuratively) a client’s kitchen and then walk off and leave it that way; to get through cleanup, I will send myself off mentally to the Olympics, Glacier National Park, or to as-yet-unvisited vacation spots. Today, as I am scrubbing pots while sipping a coffee drink in Waterton National Park, E whispers to me to come to her to collect the checks for today – she doesn’t want W to see her leaving the house. Thankfully, W is in the other room, blissfully ignorant while playing with his nanny. I finish the dishes, then turn my attention to washing down the counters and the island. P/E have big long counters and the biggest island out of any of the kitchens in which I work. Naturally, I have dirtied up every inch. If I had a 700 square foot kitchen to work in, I would use all 700 square feet. It makes for a lot more cleanup, but I prefer that to working in a cramped space. Washing down the counters and the island is actually the most time-consuming step in my cleanup process. After that, I sweep, put away the cooled food items, turn on the dishwasher, and take out the garbage and recycling. Day is done.

It is 1:30pm, a moderately short workday. Still, I was up at 6:30am this morning, and I also spent 45 minutes last night making a shopping list, pulling recipes, and doing other work to prepare for today. Maybe it’s not an 8-hour day, but it’s also not a half-day of work either. I’m happy with what I prepared today; hopefully, P/E will be also, especially the new items. After all, if I can’t make food that they like, there is really no reason for them to be paying me. I have already e-mailed them the suggested menu for next week. For now, it’s time to catch the bus and go home. Ahh, the bus – I guess it’s time for another coffee drink in Waterton.