Hungry For Time? whips up dinner for area families
Ari Plutko, 8, and Elias Plutko, 6, chow down on lettuce wraps prepared by personal chef Samantha Sloan. Sloan offers a variety of plans for families and couples to choose from that would best suit their needs.
Personal chef Samantha Sloan chops nuts for a topping for the lettuce wrap entree. Sloan creates custom menu plans for customers in the greater Pittsburgh area.
Personal chef Samantha Sloan puts the final touches on a dinner for the Plutko family of Upper St. Clair. Sloan serves the Pittsburgh area with her business, Hungry for Time?. Sloan works with the customer to create a menu, purchases the groceries and prepares the meals.
Dante, Barb, Ari, 8, and Elias Plutko, 6, enjoy lettuce wraps filled with chicken and a variety of toppings at dinner. The family occasionally has a personal chef come to cook dinner, which allows the family to spend more time together during their busy schedules.
For dinner, personal chef Samantha Sloan chopped up a variety of toppings, cooked chicken and set the table for lettuce wraps. The chicken lettuce wraps were a dish the kids enjoyed because they could choose their own toppings, like carrots, green onions, cilantro, cauliflower and different sauces.
Personal chef Samantha Sloan often begins her week perusing the aisles at grocery stores in Pittsburgh’s Strip District.
She loads bags of chicken, fresh produce, pasta and bread into her Jeep, heads to her Carnegie kitchen and gets to work preparing delicious dishes she will later deliver to her clients in Southwestern Pennsylvania: chipotle grilled chicken, lobster spaghetti, zucchini cakes, chocolate mousse.
Sloan, 31, is the owner of Hungry For Time?, one of a growing number of personal chef businesses throughout the country, and she cooks for nine families living within an hour of Downtown Pittsburgh.
She plans weekly menus, shops for ingredients, and cooks meals for her clients, primarily families who want to make sure there’s a hot, healthy meal on the table at dinner time but are too busy to shop, cook and clean up the kitchen. But she also works for people with dietary restrictions and for adults who have aging parents who can no longer cook for themselves.
“I make people’s lives easier,” said Sloan. “I love cooking and I have found a way to share my talent with other people and help take care of them.”
Sloan said hiring a personal chef isn’t much different than hiring someone to clean your house or mow your lawn, and it’s not just for the wealthy – a family of four can expect to pay about $400, including the cost of groceries, for five nights of meals with enough for leftovers.
“A lot of people think only rich and famous people have personal chefs, but it’s reasonable when you think about what you spend on dining out or picking up fast food, or when you realize you’ve spent $100 on groceries and then find rotten chicken or vegetables in the back of your refrigerator,” she said.
Among Sloan’s clients are parents Dante Plutko and Barb Belle-Plutko of Upper St. Clair, who were looking for a way to spend more time with their two children, ages 6 and 8.
Both run businesses – Plutko is an agent for Horace Mann Insurance Co. in Washington and Belle-Plutko owns FastSigns of Pittsburgh – and their children’s days are filled with activities, so finding time to cook healthy meals can be difficult.
“We both work full time, and after we work all day, we want to spend time with the kids. The last thing I want to do is come home and cook,” said Belle-Plutko, who finds herself using Sloan’s service more often in the summer (she even had Sloan prepare a romantic dinner for two once). “It’s a way to lessen the burden and lessen the stress for my husband and me, and to focus on our family.”
Sloan occasionally prepares dinners on site, but most of the time she packages meals and provides heating-instruction labels.
Another factor that drives people to hire personal chefs is an increasing awareness of the importance of healthy foods and diet.
Nutritionally conscious Belle-Plutko said she does not want to buy prepackaged or processed foods, and Sloan has a knack for preparing healthy foods that appeal to both adults and children. A favorite at the Plutko home is lettuce wraps, which they load with their favorite toppings.
One of Sloan’s families follows the Paleo Diet, so she prepares plenty of dishes with meats, fish, nuts, vegetables and seeds.
Sloan, a self-trained chef, earned a degree in photography from the Art Institute in Fort Lauderdale, and worked as a sports photographer until she took a job as a real estate photographer in the Fort Lauderdale area in 2007. She started preparing hors d’oeuvres for open houses at upscale listings.
“People were impressed and kept asking me about my food and if I catered, so I did some research and ran across the idea of being a personal chef. I ran with it,” said Sloan.
Her first client was an elderly man with health issues who took several medications.
She cooked five meals a week for him, and the man’s doctor noticed that his health began to improve as a result of his new diet.
“So the doctor hired me, and I started cooking for her family three nights a week,” recalled Sloan. “I’d prepare dinner on site. I started getting more clients and doing parties on the side, and things went really well.”
She returned to the Pittsburgh area in order to be closer to her family and opened Hungry for Time?.
Sloan is among the 9,000 personal chefs estimated to be working in the United States, according to the American Personal Chef Association. Industry experts predict that number will double in the next five years.
“It’s definitely a full-time job, and I enjoy it,” said Sloan. “I like taking the stress out of cooking for people and making healthy meals. I’ve learned a lot. And I don’t mind doing dishes.”