Chefing Retreats: Culinary Adventures Behind the Scenes

So one thing most people don’t know about me is that before I was a cooking content creator, I was actually a private chef and chef’d retreats and events. It mostly happened out of necessity during COVID, when I stopped working in restaurants, but I quickly came to love it. And this past weekend, I chef a retreat in Arizona for my friend Christina, which we actually counted. And this was the seventh retreat I chef for her, which is crazy. She’s definitely a client favorite. So here’s a sneak peek of behind the scenes of what that looks like for a day. For this day, she chose three courses for the 17 people that were there, and she also wanted a menu that was completely gluten free and dairy free, which I love because it challenges me to make a more creative menu. We started with the charcuterie and crudite board earlier in the day for grazing, since people got there kind of early. And then the rest of the afternoon, I was prepping the entree. This takes a long time. I was 17 people. It’s a lot of food. I had four trays of potatoes, which took me, honestly, forever. And then I also was ambitious and went with gluten free crispy chicken cutlets, so that I had me occupied for, like, a solid three hours of just prepping the chicken, but, hmm. It was so worth it, because everyone loves crispy chicken, and most people can’t get It because it’s gluten free, and if you’re gluten free, everyone knows it’s a nightmare to find. So I was here for making this chicken. This induction, however, was the bane of my existence. And the only temperature it had was extremely hot, so I had to move the pan off and on all. All day. It was a nightmare, but we made it work. So the end dish was actually a slaw with an apple cider vinegar dressing, a chicken cutlet with a dairy free Sherry cream sauce, and then smashed potatoes. Then I finished the night with a Berry crisp. Since it’s summer and also it’s easy to make for a lot of people, the two most important factors of chefing retreats is considering how many people you have and also the season. So I think this menu really reflected that and turned out to be great.