Freelance gourmet

Cooking handicaps come in several forms. Some people simply can't cook, and shouldn't. (You know who you are.) For others, though, the inability to cook is a matter of time and resources.

Jenny Oliphant of Minneapolis is one of those people.

She's a working mom with a 2-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old-son, both with serious food allergies that limit what they can eat. Plus, she is a vegetarian and her husband prefers a meat-filled meal.

Setting the dinner table with a meal to satisfy each of their needs is understandably a daunting task.

So Oliphant has found solace in the help of Melanie McCoy, who operates a personal chef service, Meals by Melanie, out of the west metro area.

For Oliphant, McCoy's meals aren't so much a luxury as they are a solution. "Feeding your family when it has a lot of challenges is really, really hard," she said. "She helps me be a better mom."

Today, a surprising number of people are turning to personal chefs like McCoy to solve their culinary complications. More than 72,000 homes across the country are using them, according to the American Private and Personal Chef Association, and that number is rising at a rate that has Entrepreneur Magazine calling it "one of the four fastest-growing businesses in the country."

McCoy is one of more than a dozen personal chefs with the association in the Twin Cities, all of whom are turning the business of cooking for others in their own kitchens into a big-time industry. The association estimates that it brings in upwards of $300 million each year.

Diverse base of clients

While the thought of hiring an in-home chef might conjure up ideas of a client with a big wallet and a marble-countered kitchen large enough to make an echo, McCoy says you can't generalize her client base that way.

She cooks for singles, busy parents, the elderly, dieters, vegetarians and a gamut of others with their own unique situations.

At $210 for three pre-cooked frozen meals and $350 for five -- each of which feature an entrée and a side dish and one salad and dessert -- the price is out of reach for some.

But compared to the cost of regularly eating out at moderately priced restaurants, it can be a money saver, she said. And factoring in the value of a healthier, home-cooked diet is a huge plus.

"There's a lot of ways that it's just the right decision for people," she said.

The way Oliphant sees it, McCoy is pivotal to a smoothly functioning household, making it a lot easier to justify budgeting for her meals. Every so often she has McCoy into her kitchen while she's at work to make five or so meals from scratch that she stretches out over a couple months.

And because of the portion sizes and the young age of her children, she said she finds that they last a lot longer than five dinners.

A growing field

McCoy's path to becoming a personal chef began with a lifelong passion for cooking. As a little girl she was always under her grandmother's elbow in the kitchen, poking her head into pots and pans. And she reads cookbooks like other people read novels, she said.

Then in 2000, after a career in sales had run its course, she opened a newspaper and saw a story about an in-home chef service that mentioned the personal chef association.

"I knew the second I saw the article," she said.

She contacted the association headquarters in San Diego and they helped with the formalities of starting a business. They also put her in touch with Judie McLellan, another personal chef who already was operating out of the west metro area under the moniker "The Artful Chef."

She, too, tells of an "aha" moment when looking for a new career. On a whim, she typed in "personalchef.com" on her computer and landed at the association's website. She took it as a sign, she said.

"I found out there were thousands of other people out there just like me," McLellan said.

Today, they have formed a close friendship and occasionally work together on private dinner parties. Competition between them is a non-issue, they say; business is good, and there still is more than enough opportunity for more chefs in the area, they said.

They enjoy being able to pick and choose when they work. And though neither relies on the personal chef business as her sole source of support, if they needed to, they could certainly make a living at it, they said.

Their day-to-day routines consist of sit-downs with their clients to choose the meals they want, a lot of grocery shopping, and lugging back and forth the portable kitchen that each has stowed away in the back of their cars.

And, of course, there's the cooking.

McCoy creates three seasonal menus and tends to get the most requests for home-style, traditional favorites. Hearty stews are big this time of year, she said.

McCoy has more than 30 clients at an time. Most of them come from word-of-mouth referrals and a mix of ad responses and connections made on the association website.

"I love knowing that I've made the day easier for somebody," McCoy said.

Erik Borg is a University of Minnesota student on assignment for the Star Tribune.