A Private Chef: Four Star Cooking In Your Home at Chef2Chef

A Private Chef: Four Star Cooking In Your Home will make those special occasions what you always intended them to be. How many times have you planned a special dinner party, shopped for a couple of days for the ingredients, lovingly put together a beautiful menu, and carefully put it all together in the kitchen- only to feel, at the end of the night, that the food really didn't measure up to your dreams? More show than substance? Lovely-but at its heart, under the sauce and spice, just sort of plain? With this cookbook, that won't happen.

If you're the sort of host or hostess who loves the planning, shopping, and cooking, who loves feeding others and watching delight spread to the depths of their souls, you need recipes and techniques as fine as your intentions. That's what you'll find here.

I give you a manageable number of menus, for different kinds of occasions, and I tell you how to make them. You don't have to make any huge decisions-just master the meal.

Just choose a menu and do what I say.

About The Author
Joe Ouellette resides in Manhattan, New York with his wife Marie. After five years of working in four-star restaurants he is now the private chef to Chris Browne.

Reader Reviews
No wonder this book had to be self-published: most of the menus provided require hours, if not days, of planning and work, the majority are not especially cheap (though many are quite reasonable), and no effort has been made to convert these exquisite dishes into low-fat monstrosities. This is true four-star cooking. While there are some very fine books on gourmet cooking within time and budget constraints, most cookbooks these days aim to let us believe we can produce first-rate food fast, cheap, and without calories. Yeah, sure. That's not the kind of cooking that dominates food-star menus! I just love this book. Though I will never make some of the more extravagant dishes, I've made at least a dozen of these recipes, and every one has been, in the Brits' sense of the term, well brilliant. And the writing: The author's personality shines through, and I don't know how anyone can help liking this guy. How can anyone who moves in such highfallutin' circles, someone who has trained in some of the finest restaurants in the world--and still drops in as a guest chef--be so down-to-earth and likeable? Amazing. He thanks a "ghost editor" in his preface, but the voice is of a piece with the author's whole approach to food. Whether or not you have any interest in becoming a four star chef in general, you will find some recipes here that you'll love, that you can serve with pride and joy on special occasions. Besides, the book is just great "food porn." Sometimes I just read the thing and salivate over the beautiful dishes. I must own at least three dozen cookbooks, and this is probably the most fun of them all. I can heartily say that if you really love food, you ought to buy this book.