Cooking for Seniors at Home

All about “Cooking for Seniors at Home”

As a personal chef doing business in Southern California since 2005, I serve a large variety of clients; working couples with and without children at home, singles and seniors. Senior clients requiring specialty diets have become a focus for my service and serving the senior community is a priority for me. As an advocate for the health and safety of seniors, I reach out to the community with educational programs and as a member of local and national organizations that serve to improve the quality of life for caregivers and their families.

Many times over the years my personal chef service has been called by a home care company with a request to provide a dinner service for one of their clients. The family and client is usually very grateful for the caregiver’s service, but a big compliant is that they just couldn’t stand their cooking, or they weren’t comfortable with what they saw happening in the kitchen.

In 2011 I developed Caregiver Culinary Training^™ for in-home care providers.

The program is based on my first hand experience as a personal chef serving seniors in their homes, and interviews with care givers asking what information and tools they needed to enhance their food service performance. I learned that home care aides needed more than a lesson in perfecting the art of chopping carrots and that a day of cooking lessons in a commercial kitchen wasn’t really what they needed to improve the quality of their food service. Most caregivers are the cooks for their families and often aren’t familiar with the diverse American diet. Rarely do they receive any training in food safety and sanitation.

My approach for this training program is to teach a version of my successful personal chef service. It teaches how to safely and effectively prepare meals in a short amount of time in the client’s home realizing that meal preparation is only part of the duties they are performing for their client. Practical advice and time tested methods for multi-meal preparation are explained and demonstrated.

Cooking for Seniors at Home, Caregiver Culinary Training™ provides a complete program for caregivers, teaching them the skills and information they need in culinary basics and meal planning guidelines, senior nutrition and specialty diets, cost effective grocery shopping strategies, and food and kitchen safety, complete with a personalized Certificate of Achievement upon completion of the course.

Keeping seniors healthy, with quality food prepared by well-trained caregivers…that my mission!

www.cookingforseniorsathome.com