If a holiday gathering at your house is anything like it is at mine, you know that food equals love.

In the same way that we surround ourselves with the close friends and family that give us comfort and warmth, we also incorporate into our entertaining a lot of the foods that give us comfort and warmth too. Whether it’s you Italian great-grandmother’s recipe for meatballs in sauce that have been a staple of every Sunday supper for decades or that one calorie-laden, cheesy dip that all your friends devour at the neighborhood potluck, our signature dishes are as unique as each of us are and are an integral part of our gatherings as they feed our bellies and our hearts.

But there’s a downside to all that comfort food. Enjoying celebrations where there is food involved can be hard for a lot of us. Many of us struggle with avoiding diet temptations when we’ve got delicious, high-fat, high-carbohydrate snacks at arm’s length. If you’re nodding your head and licking lips right now as you think back to that last party where the munchies got away from you, then you know how problematic party foods can be. 

Dieting is tough. Choosing the right foods day in and day out can be hard enough when there are not outside influences. But then, put that chicken dip or garlic bread right in front of our faces, add alcohol, and you’ve got a recipe for flushing all your hard work at the gym down the drain. 

So what steps do we take to avoid the calories? Sometimes we’ll starve ourselves all day if we know that we’re going to over-indulge at a party (which is, according to dieticians and trainers, usually a terrible idea since it just makes you eat more). 

Sometimes, we volunteer to bring the veggie tray and hover over it angrily, trying to avoid contact with the steam coming off of the crockpot of Cincinnati chili across the room that’s beckoning to us with all it’s salty, cheesy goodness. And, some of us, sadly, will go as far as to avoid attending a family gathering all together if we think that there won’t be enough healthy foods there.

All of us know how bad it feels to look around a party full of chips, dips, and spreads and feel like there is nothing we can eat. Luckily, for many of us, we can learn to strike a good balance of consuming the rich party foods that we love while still managing to get a few fruits and veggies on the snack plate, too. But for people with dietary restrictions due to health conditions, you might look around and not find a single thing you can enjoy at the party. And that’s every single party you attend. 

Take Celiac Disease, for instance. May is National Celiac Disease Awareness Month. While many of us may choose to avoid gluten or have mild gluten sensitivities, Celiac disease sufferers can get very sick from eating any wheat, rye or barley at all. If your friends and family know you can’t eat any gluten, yet don’t take it upon themselves to provide any gluten-free foods at your gatherings, then it can feel like you’re being personally attacked. If food is love, then looking around a room of foods you can’t eat, can make you feel really unloved.

Providing foods that your gluten-intolerant family and friends can enjoy is not all that difficult to do. Many of your favorite signature recipes can easily be made as a gluten-free version without sacrificing any of the taste. It just takes a little attention to detail, especially when you go to the grocery store. Many of the pastas and starches that you normally use are available as gluten-free versions, either in their own gluten-free aisle of the store or sometimes next to its gluten counterpart in the pasta or bread aisle. 

Many of the pastas and starches that you normally use are available as gluten-free versions, either in their own gluten-free aisle of the store or sometimes next to its gluten counterpart in the pasta or bread aisle. It’s also crucial that you do your own research if you’re unsure about something. A popular question I receive all the time… is coffee gluten free? In such cases, simply checking the packaging may not be enough… and this is why it’s important to do your own research online to find the correct answers you need.

A few more tips that may help you adapt your recipes to gluten-free versions: 

Since they don’t clump together as well, gluten-free recipe portions should be on the smaller side so they aren’t too crumbly or fall apart as you’re eating them. 

Use a stickiness agent like sweet rice flour.

A gluten-free recipe typically tastes better if you increase the amount of baking powder and baking soda by a quarter.

To help kick off National Celiac Disease Awareness Month, I’ll be going on Fox19’s morning show on Wednesday to share one of my favorite recipes for a gluten-free apple pie cheesecake. Tune in to hear how I adapt my cooking to a gluten-free pie crust and still keep it gourmet, or click over to my blog for the instructions and recipe. 

This week’s issue about New Businesses got me to thinking about the great advice I’ve learned along the way in building my culinary entertaining business, The At Home Chef. But it also made me reflect on the tough decisions and gobs of bad advice that so many women entrepreneurs have to endure in building their own business empires. 

Early in my wife Julie’s career, she was faced with the tough choice of moving to Boston. While that decision ultimately helped her move up the corporate ladder in the financial services industry, it wasn’t easy. She had to uproot her life and leave her family in Texas not knowing where she might end up. But she took a leap of faith.

The company she was working for offered Julie another promotion and transfer, which led her to Northern Kentucky and to me. We met through mutual friends, and at the time while she was soaring professionally, I was struggling to get my new career in the culinary world off the ground. As a trusted friend, romantic interest, and savvy business woman, Julie helped me to forge my path, to harness my passion and drive for cooking and entertaining, and to develop it into the fulfilling and lucrative career I have today.

Between my successful wife, my friends and business associates, and my professional networking groups, I’ve been very lucky to have been given a great deal of good business advice. So I thought I’d pay that forward and share a little of what I’ve learned: 

1. Don’t allow your haters stop you from doing what you want with your life. 

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Your mother, your spouse, your siblings, or even people that you call your friends might try discourage you. These are your “haters”–the people in your life disguised as loved ones who want to see you fail. They will tell you all sorts of horrible things and cast doubt in your mind: You don’t have the time, the resources, or the intelligence. They will tell you that similar businesses have failed and that you’re making a big mistake. They will even use your children against you by telling you that your kids will suffer from you taking on a career in addition to raising them. 

Don’t listen to the haters–especially when it comes to being both a mom and a successful entreupreuneur. No, you can’t do it all, but you can do a lot more than others may tell you that you can’t do. You have more time than you think. You have the internet, wi-fi, and a mobile phone on you 24/7, which means you can multitask more effectively than you could have even just five years ago. Many mothers who are also successful entrepreneurs today are utilizing new technology to sell their products or services completely over their websites, blogs, Etsy shops, or their instagram profiles. All the while, multitasking, learning new skills, raising amazing kids, and raking in the dough. 

So when you stop listening to your haters, all these supposed reasons that you can’t be professionally successful begin to disappear. Then what do you do? How do you even start?

2. Be Aggressively Patient. 

One of my favorite business tips I learned a few years back when I was building The At Home Chef was a term called aggressive patience. What this means is that you can’t just assume that the day you start your business, that your inbox will be flooded with orders. You have to put in a lot of hard work and be observant and critical about what’s working and what is not. You have to be patient when those around you (your haters) will question you and tell you that you should quit.

By drowning out your haters, you’ll be able to begin the hard work of adjusting your business model, your customer base, and maybe even your mission to developing a product or service that people need and want and will come back to again and again. Your business should be in a state of constant, aggressive improvement. 

Patience, though, also comes in accepting some failures. Your failures are often going to be publicly broadcasted, especially to your haters. They will laugh and tell you it’s time to quit, but your aggressive patience will tell you no, it’s not time to panic. Aggressive patience will allow you to understand that you don’t need to throw in the towel, you just need to make some more tweaks and keep on grinding.

3. Never Take Advice From a Non-Expert.

This one may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often you do it. For instance, you may eagerly accept your cardiologist’s professional opinion when it comes to avoiding high cholesterol or controlling your arrhythmia, but you wouldn’t ask him what’s causing the pinging sound in the engine of your car. Why? Because he’s an expert on diagnosing noises in hearts, not in cars! 

When you are building a business, everyone wants to give you advice. However good their intentions may be, both your haters and well-intentioned family, friends, and even complete strangers will want to put in their two cents on how you should be running your business. The problem with their advice is that non-experts have no idea how to achieve the goals that you’ve set forth for yourself. 

For example, if you’re developing a website as an e-commerce storefront for your business, don’t listen to what your hairdresser has to say about whether to use Shopify. Instead, contact a colleague who’s a web developer and tap into what they know. Call a friend who runs a similar e-commerce online shop and invite her out for coffee to talk it over. 

When a non-expert tells you what you should do with your business, just nod, smile, and consider this final very important tip:

4. Take Time to Bask In Blissful Discontent.

Each day that you’re in business-building mode, decide what your priorities are, make a checklist, check them off as you accomplish them, then critically analyze whether or not they were successful. If they were, then take a few moments to enjoy the victories. Have a glass of Prosecco, pat yourself on the back, but then don’t linger on it. Go back to your checklist and keep grinding. At the end of a successful quarter or blockbuster year, throw a party. (And call to book me, I’ll cook for you!) 

In closing, here are some very encouraging stats I found, courtesy of National Association of Women Business Owners: 

These statistics are indicative of what women are capable of when they ignore the haters and take necessary but difficult leaps of faith in both their personal and professional lives. 

As I sit here with my glass of blissful discontentment bourbon, my thoughts turn to all the women out there (such as my wife Julie) who have spent years taking brave leaps toward their current success. I also am thinking about my awesome female clients that are taking brave leaps daily and taking time to enjoy their victories, and also thinking about all of you who are inspired by this issue of Cincy Chic and are about to take your very first brave leap…

I would like to propose a toast:

May the hard rock blare in your earbuds to drown out your haters while a bottle of Prosecco chills in the fridge, primed and ready to be popped when you hit your goals (which you WILL do).

Does this scenario sound familiar? You’re hosting a party at your house. You’re looking forward to seeing friends and family and showing off your newly-renovated gourmet kitchen. The guests arrive. You spend the entire party in the kitchen “in the weeds” cooking, refilling chip trays, refreshing drinks, and mopping up spills. Your guests say goodbye and there you are staring at a sink full of dirty dishes. In your exhaustion, it occurs to you that you didn’t sit down once all night or have one meaningful conversation with any of the people you love.

If that sounds anything like your last party, you’re not alone. A lot of my clients tell me they love their families and friends and that they love entertaining, but it is just so hard to do it all. A lot of my clients are perfectionists, striving to build successful businesses, working hard, trying to raise happy, healthy children. They truly want to celebrate the milestones in their lives by throwing parties that will become lasting memories.

As women, you give so much. In addition to all the time and effort you give to your employer, to your clients, and to your co-workers during the day, you want to give your best when you go home at night, too. When you decide to throw a party for your family or friends, your concern for their comfort and enjoyment often plays into the logistics of how you plan the event. You make sure not to have shrimp if you someone is allergic to shellfish. You buy that one brand of potato chips that your husband likes. You make sure there is a comfortable chair for your aunt who is recovering from hip surgery. 

Your careful planning and execution is important to you, since you want everyone to enjoy the time they spend in your home. But what happens so often is that real life gets in the way. Meetings run longer than expected. Kids get sick. Husbands (dare I say it?) aren’t always helpful.

Over and over again, in both my personal life and with my clients, I see women who give and give. They give so much that they struggle to find happiness. And it makes me sad to watch the women I care about sacrifice so much of themselves in order to make others happy and keep that illusion of perfection afloat. 

When it Unravels

I had a client last year who exemplified the perfect hostess. When I met her to plan her meal, I could tell that she wanted her in-home party to be a reflection of who she is—a polished and poised professional whose house looks like the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. And everything was rolling along perfectly. Then on the afternoon of her party, I arrived at her front door. with groceries and supplies to begin preparing her meal. When she answered, I saw that she was wearing old sweats, the babysitter was late to pick up her kids, and her gourmet kitchen looked like a tornado had hit it. 

I could read the stress and desperation on her face as she apologized and explained, “It has just been one of those days.” So I spring into action. It’s no secret in my business that my clients become family from the day they hire me, so that night I did a lot more than just cook for her and her friends. I pitched in to watch her kids while she got a shower and get dressed. I helped her restore her normally beautiful home to its former state of glory and ready to receive company. By the time the first guests arrived, I could see that she was much more relaxed and ready to put the day’s events behind her and just have some fun.

What that party taught me is that even those people who we think seem to have it together all the time, they have bad days too. We’re all just struggling to get through life sometimes and the only way we get it all done is to rely on the help of one another.

The Parties You Thought You’d Have

If you’re like many of the women I know, you envisioned when you bought your current house that you’d have so many parties there. You made improvements to your home specifically with entertaining in mind. You poured time and money into renovating several smaller rooms to an open floor plan where friends and family could gather around food and drink. 

An earlier version of you was so excited to throw parties. You were the first in the family to volunteer to hold Thanksgiving and were so excited for your home improvement show-style reveal of your new kitchen that you worked so hard to renovate and redecorate. So how did you get to this point where it all just seems like a hassle? What do you do when having a party doesn’t even sound appealing? 

Getting Out Of the Rut

It certainly isn’t that you love your family or friends any less. It’s not that you dislike parties. You actually really enjoy entertaining when you’re not trying to juggle the drinks, the food, your guests’ individual needs, and a million other details that leave you frustrated and a little depressed by night’s end. 

So maybe it means you make some changes to planning your next party. Maybe you talk to your husband about what he can do to help you more. Maybe your kids get a list of chores that includes tidying up the house before they go to the babysitter. And maybe (shameless plug), you hire a chef so that buying the food, cooking, feeding your guests, and cleaning your kitchen are things you no longer have to worry about that night.

One of the main tenets of my business is “Enjoy Life” because I feel like it’s something we need to be reminded to do every so often. Many of us get so wrapped up in trying to manufacture a life that looks good on social media. We forget to reach out and ask for help from our loved ones. We often don’t lean enough on the people in our lives who want to help (if you’ll just ask, and that often includes your husband). Just remember before you plan your next party, it’s okay to give yourself grace. And it’s okay to enjoy your life in the present moment just the way you are, imperfections and all.

What comes to mind when you think of a salad? 

Some consider salad a “diet” food. How common is it to order a salad instead of a burger when you go out to eat since it’s perceived as a healthier choice or lower-calorie option? And, as we all know, so many salads that started with calorie-free vegetables aren’t at all healthy by the time you mix it with dressing, cheese, croutons, etc.

Outside of being a replacement for a main course, a salad is typically a first course. It’s the introduction to a balanced meal. The salad course is what kicks your palette into gear and gets you ready for the epicurean adventure to come. Sadly, though, so many salads are uninspired. How many times do you think you’ve sat down to a plate of iceberg lettuce, a few julienned carrots, and a thin, watery dressing? 

I’ve had a lot boring salads. While we’ll leave the gender stereotypes out of it, it may be partly because I’m a man that I just never thought of a salad as anything to get excited about. Men are not typically brought up to love salads. So even with my culinary background, chopped greens on a plate soaked in ranch was what usually initially came to mind when I thought of a salad. 

My Salad Conversion

When I meet my clients for the first time, I start by asking them what their favorite meal is. Usually, I’ll be told about a decadent pasta dish or a steak that was seasoned and cooked to perfection. I get a lot of people tell me about some phenomenal dish they had at a celebrities’ New York City or Los Angeles restaurants or locally from one of Jean-Robert deCavel’s or Jeff Ruby’s fine dining establishments.

But there was one time that I asked my client what her favorite meal was, and she replied, “It was this salad…”

I listened intently, hoping to develop a custom menu for the upcoming party based on things she loved about the salad. She went on to describe the fresh-caught New England lobster seasoned with salt, pepper and lime juice, rolled inside slices of honeydew melon and topped with hearts of palm, cubes of grapefruit, and avocado. It wasn’t so much the individual ingredients that made it special, but how they all blended together so perfectly like a symphony. She also mentioned that no matter how many times she had ordered it before, her husband would read over the bill and exclaim, “Twenty-six dollars for a salad?!” to which she replied confidently, “That salad is worth every cent.”

How that client described the best meal she ever ate got to thinking more about salads, and how they really get a bad rap. While it’s just the starter course, the salad set the tone for the whole meal. So I wondered, what is it that elevates a salad? What makes a salad so extraordinary that you’re talking about it years later?

I couldn’t think of one that stood out, so I asked my wife about her favorite salad. She showed me a photo she took of a lobster salad that she had ordered at Matunuck Oyster Bar in Rhode Island where we own a second home. We have had some fantastic meals there, which I think is due to its proximity to the water. Because of the plentiful wild-caught seafood that chefs have to work with, they are careful to source produce locally so their lobster, crab, and oyster dishes are accompanied on the plate by the best vegetables available. Together, that makes a huge difference in turning a plain old seafood salad into a spectacular dish worthy of remembering.

Elevating Your Salad

When you’re making a salad at home and want it to be truly memorable, put the time and effort into it by using these tips:1. Go to a farmer’s market or purchase vegetables directly from a family farm. 2. When you do your shopping, get out of the romaine/iceberg rut. Look for greens with different textures and flavors like spinach, arugula, or dandelion leaves and mix them together. 3. No matter what meat you use, it should be just as fresh as the vegetables, so consider whether you are buying meat and seafood that’s humanely raised, antibiotic-free, and sustainable. 4. Think beyond meat. Proteins like eggs, nuts, and quinoa are great in salads.5. Use fresh herbs and mix your own salad dressing instead of buying it in a bottle, and dress your salad before you plate it.

Whether you’re eating it as your only course or as the start of a multi-course meal, your salad should be special! If you’d like more tips and tricks on salads, follow me and send a message on Instagram.

As a private chef, I cook meals for all sorts of special occasions. While I’ve been privileged to curate cuisine for luxurious birthday parties, anniversary dinners, and even small company functions, I’ve also had the opportunity to work a different kind of event—and they are one I’d never be invited to as a guy! I’m talking about the GNO, or Girlfriends’ Nights Out.

Over the years, I’ve been hired to prepare meals for a lot of them, so here’s the 411 on GNOs (from a guy’s perspective):

Rule #1- No Boys Allowed

My GNO clients (who are amazing, successful, and dynamic women) have told me that the goal of their ladies’-only evening is for the busy women in their lives to have a chance to take a night off from their husbands or boyfriends to focus on celebrating and enriching the connections that they share as women.

Along with no guys, a GNO is typically also a night away from the kids, too. Many of my clients have told me that this is especially needed for stay at home moms. I could not agree more. The SAHMs I know somehow balance weeks full of endless soccer practices, PTA meetings, science projects, drying tears, cleaning up spills, and still managing to get everyone (and the dog) in matching sweaters for Christmas pictures. You deserve a night off from that craziness.

I also think about the women in my life who are rocking out demanding careers, going to school, caring for an elderly parent, or putting in thankless volunteer hours in your communities to make them better. And many of you are balancing many, if not all of all these roles. You all are amazing, and you all deserve a night off.

GNOs By the Decade
In your 20s, your GNO was all about going out on the town, dressing up to the nines, wearing your cutest dress with your highest heels, and dancing the night away in them… which I have no clue how you do, and fully respect when you take them off and just jam out in your bare feet.

But I digress.  

So then, life happens and as you get into your 30s, your GNOs start to look a little different. It might involve back-and-forth texts for months until finally the planets align and somehow you can all get a babysitter on the same night and score reservations for seven at the hottest new OTR restaurant. So you go, you eat, you share, you laugh—and it’s transformative. Your girlfriends have brought you back from the edge of your sanity and brought out the “fun” in you again.
And you vow to keep doing it.

Then your 40s arrive and your GNO gently changes again with every other beautiful imperfection you’ve come to accept and embrace about yourself. You’ve officially stopped caring so much about what you’re wearing anymore or even what hot new restaurant you’re checking into on Instagram. Forget all that because where you’re at doesn’t matter—what matters is who you’re there with. And that’s when you decide to bring the girls night out in.

While your traditions may get altered as careers and husbands and babies and life happen, the spirit of your GNO remains intact. A GNO is about building and nurturing the bonds you have with the important women in your life. Through all of your life changes, your girlfriends have been your constant. You support each other on your brave journeys, motivating one another through everything from husband problems to job stresses to dealing with the gravity of breast cancer. You elevate one another gracefully in a way that, frankly, us guys really don’t know how to do.

The Definition of Eating Well
The women I’ve worked with on planning their GNO have had vastly different dietary needs—some request to keep it light (yet still gourmet and locally-sourced), Keto-friendly, or vegetarian/vegan-friendly. Or, on the flip side I’ve had women want to give their girlfriends a night off from their diets too and make something really decadent. The three tenets of my business are 1.) pamper yourself, 2.) enjoy life, and 3.) eat well. Eating well doesn’t always mean eating healthy. Sometimes eating well means that if you and your girlfriends want to eat bread—I’m going to make sure you eat the best damn bread in the tristate. If you want lobster, I’ll fly it in fresh the same day from Maine.

You’re going to enjoy the best food at an At Home Chef party, but what I’ve come to learn is that a GNO isn’t about the food. It’s about support and empowering.

Last December I had the honor to cook for a group of women who have been gathering for their GNO every single year for the past 27 years. Since the day they graduated high school together, they’ve come back at least once a year and have been there for each other through whatever life brought them.

It struck me the night I was preparing their dinner that it’s definitely not a coincidence that my client and her girlfriends are all so successful in life. Bankers, lawyers, doctors, hairdressers—they all resonated the same theme, which was that supporting one another’s careers has made a key difference in their lives. For them, their GNO honors their bond of friendship in a way that helps them all soar, both professionally and personally.

Bringing the Girls Night Out In
That’s the kind of friendship I see over and again and it’s all because the GNO these women planned in their home with my company gave them a night to just talk with no worries of who’s driving with whom, who had too much to drink, where to park, or what time the dinner reservation is. You’re all there in one house together, there’s no clean up to worry about (because I do all that), and you can have as much wine as you want because you know going in that you can all spend the night.

In the age of social media, it’s so easy to occasionally send a DM or text to your besties and move on with your day. It seems like it’s enough—but deep down you know it’s not. You need those genuinely warm hugs; you need the fits of laughter; you need that closeness that can only be felt when you have a GNO.

If you’re considering where to hold your next GNO, why not do it at home? The At Home Chef can take care of all the details so you can focus on what’s important—supporting your girlfriends, helping one another do this life thing, and inspiring and empowering each other like the extraordinary women you are.