Friends had told Dena Fisher and Jen Allred they should meet each other, but no one introduced them.
However, the Vermilion-based personal chefs made each other’s acquaintance at a wine tasting in the fall, quite coincidentally.
“It’s amazing that it took as long as it did for us to meet,” recalls Allred during a recent phone interview. “We were just sitting across the table from each other, and we were both talking about how we were in the food industry. We just had a laugh when we both found out we were personal chefs.”
While they both are trying to fill this niche in the area, each is doing it differently.
And Fisher has been doing it longer – for seven years or so.
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Dena FisherEach week from Monday through Thursday, through the business
Dena’s Table, Fisher prepares for clients “what we are eating at our table,” as her website states.
“I post the menu (for the following week) Thursday and ask that orders be placed by Sunday,” she says during a separate phone interview. “And then you pick up your dinner for the day that you order here at my door, and it’s hot and ready for your table.”
She grew up in Waynesburg, south of Canton, where her extended family – complete with home cooks aplenty – lived on the same block.
“I never had a box of mac and cheese or Rice-A-Roni,” she says. “That was something I didn’t ever learn about until I was in my 20s.”
After having her second child and growing frustrated with her job in public health, she “decided to take a year off, and then that year has turned into, like, the last seven years, eight years.”
The new career stems, she says, from a joke made by a neighbor that she’d pay Fisher to make for her family whatever she were going to make the following week for her own, the two laughing at the idea.
“And that’s actually what I started doing – and what I still do today,” she says. “I call it Dinner In.”
She bases her menus largely on what’s available seasonally and prioritizes whole and organic ingredients whenever possible while also going for “unstuffy” weeknight meals.
“Last night, we had chickpea-and-sweet-potato curry, and I made a little mango salad on the side. And I’ve been working with a new sourdough starter, so I used some of the discard to make some naan,” Fisher says. “It varies. Sometimes it's chicken with potatoes and vegetables … But other times it's smoked brisket with slaw and sweetcorn.”
She cuts orders off if she hits 50 servings, she says – she has to make enough for her family, as well – and keeps in mind the meals need to travel and possibly be refrigerated and reheated.
“I’m really careful about things that I prepare. For instance, I don’t make a lot of white fish because it doesn’t reheat well. It kind of loses its texture and weight if it sits out, so salmon is pretty much my go-to fish,” she says. “I don’t do mussels, clams or things like that that you really want to enjoy right away, right from the kitchen.”
She saves those dishes for multi-course dinners she offers on the family’s small farm on North Ridge Road, just off Baumhart Road, preferring to call the meals “carefully curated” over “upscale.”
She also caters and teaches.
Among her most popular take-home meals are her eggplant parmesan – “It’s a dish I’m pretty proud of, that I usually sell out of when I offer it” and lasagna. The latter is a family affair, Fisher recruiting her mother and children into its preparation.
“It’s a whole thing,” she says. “It requires more than just my hands.”
She posts many of her flavorful creations to
Instagram.
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Jen Allred (Photo/Sage Amato)Like Fisher, Allred has no formal culinary training. In fact, her former life was as a project engineer for NASA, like husband Bob Kowalski, the pair coming to the area from New Mexico years ago to work at what is now the Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility.
“In my adult life, I have always loved cooking,” she says. “And around the time when Bob and I realized we were able to retire and resign (respectively), I started thinking, ‘Well, I still have a lot of fight left in me. I certainly need something else to do.’”
She learned of the concept of a personal chef, and it really resonated with her – particularly, she says, with incorporating the goal of giving people healthy options.
“For a family that’s busy, the easy thing is that Taco Bell is on the way home,” she says.
Also easy, if perhaps less economical: hire her to come into your kitchen and prepare a full, healthy meal for your table. Although the catering arm of her
Bountiful Personal Chef Services is her most popular service since she created the business in early 2022, she is working to build the former part up.
“You know, I think it’s asking a lot for somebody to trust a complete stranger to come into their house and use their utensils, possibly … without them being home,” she acknowledges. “I think personal cheffing is very popular in larger cities.
“(Here) it’s kind of a foreign concept to people.”
Allred’s no stranger to trying to expand folks’ culinary horizons.
“I mostly enjoy making international cuisines,” she says. “I love making Lebanese, Mediterranean food.
“I love surprising people with new flavors. That’s thrilling to me – seeing that surprise on somebody’s face when what seemingly is a simple flavor combination really changes their perspective on what a culture is.”
She calls creating the business “an absolute riot,” Allred taking the name Bountiful from a since-closed New Mexico bakery she adored.
That said, she has to remind herself to devote as much time as possible to her business – she’s a “dabbler” who fills her time with this, that and the other. (At the time of this conversation, she was about a week away from beginning her stint as president of the Rotary Club of Vermilion.)
As she’s worked to build up Bountiful, she says she’s sought advice from the more experienced Fisher, calling her “a wonderful friend.”
“I had a quick job come up recently, and it was unique,” Allred says. “I called Dena and I said, ‘I don’t know how to price this – what would you do?’ And she and I talked through it, and she told me how she would go about it. And it was a little bit different than what I ended up proposing, but it helps so much just having her guidance.”