Personal chefs' food isn't rich

If you had a personal chef, you might imagine yourself ordering blini with caviar to begin dinner, then rare beef Wellington for the main course.

In fact, the people who hire personal chefs today are more likely asking for healthful courses without the flashy presentation. In 4 1/2 years, Denise Hobby has never had a client request anything all that fancy. "It's always been healthy choices and comfort food," says the personal chef. Most often requested dishes include chicken pot pie, beef stir-fry, pan-blackened scallops, pork tenderloin with apples, and black bean lasagna. Patti Anastasia, another personal chef, has clients looking for dishes like her bronzed salmon fillets with wine and capers. So hiring a personal chef pretty much guarantees that you'll eat well -- and exactly what you want.

Hobby and Anastasia do what most chefs do: They prepare enough meals to last clients a week or, sometimes, a month. After work, all the clients have to do is reheat servings from the refrigerator or freezer.

Anastasia describes a typical day. Normally she's out of her house by 8 a.m., and doesn't leave the client's house until 4 or 5 in the afternoon (she always cooks in the client's kitchen). First stop is the supermarket, where she gets all her supplies. She hauls her own equipment to each of her 14 clients because she finds certain tools indispensable and wants to be sure they're handy. Her equipment list reads like a guide to essential tools: a 12-inch pot with lid, 6-quart Dutch oven, 4-quart saucepan, baking sheets, chef's knife, paring knife, slotted spoon, silicon spatulas, lemon reamer, garlic press, and tongs. She also brings her own cutting boards, towels, and aprons.

Usually Anastasia has three or four items going at once -- on the stove or in the oven. She cooks the full menu and cools it, then packages the servings, sometimes in disposable containers, other times with a vacuum sealer. Then she labels everything and stacks the dishes in the refrigerator or freezer. Before she goes, she cleans the kitchen as if no one had been there.

Most local chefs have carved niches in their markets. For Anastasia, it's gluten-free clients. "I find people who have a lot of restrictions in their diet are really looking for solutions," she says. "They want meals that taste great but still feel normal. They want food that other people in the household can eat, too."

Hobby, who lives in central Massachusetts, also cooks for clients with special nutritional requirements. She makes food for people who are dieting or want to get healthier or are on a cardiac rehab diet. "They're not being thrown to the wolves," she says.

While Hobby and Anastasia prepare meals for clients to reheat, other chefs specialize in events. Lyn Buckley-Mogan has done a number of tapas parties. For other events, Buckley-Mogan balances menus with cold and hot dishes like mushroom bruschetta and spinach and pine nut salad. Often she includes a seafood or vegetable paella.

Leslee Barbosa also does large-scale cooking. Recently, she made dinner for three couples who normally get together at restaurants every few months to celebrate birthdays. This time they hired her, and the guests came three hours early to watch her cook. "You get a lot of people asking questions," Barbosa says. "How do you prepare this? How do you cook that? It's almost like a cooking class , but it's very comfortable because they're in their own home." Guests can watch Barbosa prepare dishes like miniature crab cakes with chili-lime aioli, borek of asparagus, and roasted eggplant soup with mozzarella croutons.

All of this might sound like dinner for the moneyed crowd only, but pricing lists show that the service is reasonable. "Most of my clients are average, dual-income couples," Anastasia says. "The parents are both working in professional jobs, and some are self-employed. They're normal people. I'm not cooking in any mansions."

Barbosa agrees that it's a very affordable luxury, especially when you consider that the average family eats out four times a week. The chef notices that many families have good intentions and fill their fridge every weekend. "But come Tuesday night," says Barbosa, "the last thing they want to do is cook, so they end up stopping for pizza or Chinese. A lot of the grocery store food goes bad anyway."

Though some of the chefs have websites that are linked to national sites like personalchefsnetwork .com, word of mouth is Hobby's favorite way to advertise. "People know what they're getting," she says. "Coming to a client on some one else's good word is more important than anything else."

Nowadays, satisfied customers are likely raving about comfort food.

Patti Anastasia, Anastasia’s Table, 603-818-9991 or anastasiastable.com.

Leslee Barbosa, The Daily Gourmet, 508-415-5200 or pcnchef.com/thedailygourmet.

Lyn Buckley-Mogan, A Touch of Spice, 781-956-6453 or atouchofspicepcs.com.

Denise Hobby, The Wooden Spoon, 508-769-0692, thewoodenspoonpcs.com.