good and good for you ++ about the chef

Michele Watkins is a Personal Chef and cooking instructor in Nashville with her company Good and Good For You. She draws her influences from places that she's lived like Lafayette, Louisiana and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it shows in her food. Michele leans towards Vegetarian, Asian Fusion and healthy organic cooking, but isn't above adding butter, bacon or a healthy dose of chocolate when needed! Michele is a member of Nashville Chefs and the American Personal Chefs Association.

The Long Version

I was born in Michigan, we lived there until I was ten, when we moved to Lafayette, Louisiana. It was a bit of a culture shock; I was overwhelmed by the culture, the music and the food. I'd been cooking since I was about ten, baking cakes and breads, learning to follow a recipe. My beer bread recipe was quite the hit in the neighborhood. I went to high school in Lafayette and college in Baton Rouge at LSU. I really started cooking in college. My boyfriend and I would spend all day Sunday going through cookbooks, picking out interesting looking recipes, shopping for and making a feast for us and friends for that evening. After college, I landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was drawn there for the snow boarding but ending up cooking in a restaurant and almost buying it after 4 years. I was in Santa Fe for almost 5 years, then in Portland, OR at a European bakery. A really bad case of tendonitis brought me here to my dad's to recover, and to a job with an Internet Service Provider. This was about 6 years ago, a great time to be in the ISP business, and I found myself caught up in growing this small company. Once we'd built it up and eventually sold the company to an International ISP, I knew I wanted to get back to cooking. I started working at Viking Culinary Institute in Franklin as a Chef's assistant and teacher, and started cooking in people's homes as a Personal Chef.

My first professional cooking was done by studying under Chef Lynn Walters in Santa Fe at the Natural Cafe, a mostly vegetarian gourmet restaurant that specialized in organic foods, also serving free range chicken and fresh fish. Many ethnic styles were represented in the menu, from New Mexican to East Indian to Italian to Asian. It was a wonderful place to get a foundation of cooking experience. Cooking at Viking has been an excellent source for French and Southern cooking styles and recipes (in other words, meat). I love teaching cooking, I love getting folks excited about cooking and food, and I enjoy making it easy and de-mystifying the cooking process for them. I think that a varied background is very important in a good chef. Every person I've ever cooked for has a different kind of food style in mind, and varying degrees of spice levels and ideas of what makes a complete dinner, so it's important to be flexible.

I've been a personal chef for over a year. I was really looking for a way to get back to my love of cooking professionally, without having to look for work in a restaurant. I'd cooked for friends for many years, and it was actually one of the single young guys with whom I'd worked at the Internet Service Provider who suggested it first. He wanted a way to get good food at home without having to eat out constantly or eat bad frozen food. That was the spark that got me doing research about Personal Cheffing, and finding www.personalchef.com was a gift. All my questions about that kind of business were answered right away, and was able to get started rather quickly. I've found myself drawn to the dinner party kind of Personal Cheffing as much as the full cooking day; it seems to be the best of both worlds. Not only does my customer get to enjoy a dinner party at home without having to worry about the shopping, cooking, serving or cleanup, but I get to present the food hot and plated up beautifully, and I get to be there to hear the "ooohs and ahhhs." Sometimes we will work in a cooking lesson as part of an interactive dinner party, where the customer and guests actually help prepare part of the meal and learn different cooking techniques and recipes. I love getting people excited about cooking, but even more so, excited about eating good food!

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