The heath factor about eating at home

Busy life, high demand at work, meetings, family time, house work, all seem like endless tasks that keep piling up on our to do lists. People these days are just too busy to worry about food. Research shows that the majority of Americans depend on restaurants for lunch and a few eat every day with their families at home. The tendency of Americans eating out keeps increasing every year. Here is where the problem is. Most people think that restaurants, fast food in particular, are very unhealthy and they are right. However, they also believe that eating at sit down restaurants is a healthier choice and that's just not true.  Restaurant food these days have great amounts of sodium and are very high in calories.

Here are a few examples for some popular restaurants. Keep in mind that the healthy amount of sodium per day is 2300 mg and people should eat around 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day :

 

PF Changs:

Mongolian Beef: 2700 mg of Sodium, 720 Calories

Pad Thai Chicken 3720 mg of Sodium, 1160 Calories

Lemon Grass Chicken Salad: 780 mg of Sodium, 590 Calories

 

Season’s 52:

Alaskan Salmon: 1130 mg of Sodium, 470 Calories

Scallops:1870 mg of Sodium, 470 Calories

 

Even a place like Season's 52, which is known for low calorie food, have large amounts of sodium in their food. Eating out, most of the time, is eating unhealthy. That’s a fact and it’s ok to treat ourselves with some of these foods once in a while, but eating them on a Monday through Friday basis may just kill you sooner than you think.
 

Eating at home is the best (and arguably only practical) option to keep healthy. You control what you buy and you control what you eat. What if you, like most people, just don’t have the time? Then we're here to help.  Atlanta Personal Chef Service is here to help you maintain your health by cooking healthy delicious meals. Give us a try. We will do the grocery shopping for you, cook, clean and even serve the food if you'd like.  We've been cooking for families for over three years. We have the experience. We cook daily meals for families in Buckhead, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Marietta, Atlanta, Decatur, and other cities surrounding the Atlanta area. We do weekly meals chef service, dinner parties, cooking lessons, brunches, breakfast, cocktail parties and more. Find out more about us by visiting our website.

Working as a Personal Chef vs In a Restaurant

Working in a restaurant versus as a personal chef in a home can be very different in some ways. In both restaurants and in homes, we always, without a doubt make food taste delicious. There’s a huge difference, however, in how that happens. When working in a restaurant, you want the guests to continue to come back, so for instance, the mashed potatoes will be loaded with gallons of heavy cream. It may not be good for you, but in reality, it tastes really good. If a guest doesn’t finish their meal, and decides to take it home, you don’t have to worry about giving reheating instructions, unless they ask for them. Fine dining can get very hectic on an everyday basis, so sometime cooks may not put the amount of love into preparing a meal like a private or personal chef would.

When a personal chef is working in a client’s home, the food also will always taste great, however, we won’t load heavy cream in our potatoes or use a ton of oil to sear a chicken breast. We always have to be mindful of what and how much of an ingredient is going into our client’s food, especially if there are any health restrictions. Leaving proper and complete reheating instructions are very important too. Some people really do need instructions on how to use their oven. Also if a filet mignon is reheated too long, you have one component of a great meal gone to waste. We are great cooks and we know how to make food very tasteful without all of the extra fat. Using the freshest ingredients, we can make that happen.

One of the similarities of working in a private home versus a restaurant is that you have to clean up. The same way that you would wipe down the line in an industrial kitchen or wipe the handles of your walk-in, we clean the handles of the refrigerator and make sure to clean the island and any other surfaces that are dirty. We may be working in slightly different settings, but we always have to make sure that your kitchen is clean and tidy when we’re finished cooking.

In a lot of ways, skills acquired in restaurants are carried over to the world of being a personal chef, but there are many things that personal chefs need to change to be successful. Since we’re providing so many meals, they need to taste great without all the extra fatty ingredients, so we rely more on fresh herbs and spices for great flavor without all the fat.

This post was written by Atlanta Personal Chef Service’s Georgena Mason. Below, you’ll see some of the dishes she’s recently cooked for families around Atlanta. To find out more about our services, please visit our website at www.AtlantaPersonalChefService.com.



Atlanta Personal Chef Service - Basic Service Family Style Meal

Atlanta Personal Chef Service - Basic Service Family Style Meal

Atlanta Personal Chef Service - Basic Service Family Style Meal

Tips For Eating Out Healthy

Many people frequent restaurants a little too often than is good for their health.  Even the healthier restaurants often serve sodium-laden, high caloric meals.  Atlanta Personal Chef Service advises people that eating out should be enjoyed sparingly, and not on a daily basis. The first option should always be home cooked meals, but we know that often there are many factors which make that quite difficult.  By either cooking yourself at home or having one of our talented chefs doing the cooking, you will know where your food is coming from and what is added into it.  Of course, there are those days, especially the weekends, when you're more likely to indulge in restaurant food. What do you do then? Well, Atlanta Personal Chef Service has a few tips to give.

1. Order from a lower calorie menu, if the restaurant has one. A lot of restaurants these days have a lower calorie menu. If they don’t, then eat half of the dish and save the other half for the next day. With plates these days having a minimum of 1500 calories, it’s advisable that you don’t eat all of those calories at once.

2. If you are at a pizza place, ask for a thin crust pizza. Instead of pepperoni, top with chicken, seafood, or veggies.

3. Don’t ever get combos with chips. At Mexican restaurants, don’t ask for extra chips or limit your intake if they are brought to your table. Choose water over soda drinks and always choose grilled over fried.

4. Skip the bun and the fries. There are 250 empty calories in the white flour bun that you don’t need. Instead, ask for whole grain if they have it, or no bun if they don’t.

Eating healthy these days is no easy task. Even when the calories of the dish may be at healthy levels, the usual amount of sodium is very high. Atlanta Personal Chef Service is here to make everyday life simple. Enjoy home cooked, delicious, healthy meals every day, by letting our chefs cook for you. We also do dinner parties and other special occasion festivities. Contact us or follow us at our Facebook page. We serve Buckhead, Atlanta, Marietta, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Vinings, Midtown and other Atlanta neighborhood cities.

Let Atlanta Personal Chef Service Help You With Your New Year’s Resolution

According to http://www.usa.gov, the top New Year’s Resolutions are to “ lose weight, volunteer to help others, quit smoking, get a better education, get a better job, save money, get fit, eat healthy food, manage stress, manage debt, take a trip, reduce, reuse, and recycle, drink less alcohol.” The majority of these resolutions are about being healthy and maintaining a healthy diet. Whether your resolution is to lose weight or to eat healthier meals Atlanta Personal Chef Service is here to help you. Everyday our chefs are cooking healthy delicious meals to families living around Atlanta, Buckhead, Marietta, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Vinnings, and other neighborhoods in and around Atlanta. 

All of our chefs graduated from great culinary schools and have a lot of experience. They cook meals that are delicious, healthy, and with low salt content. Let Atlanta Personal Chef Service help with accomplishing those resolutions. Give us a try and we guarantee you that you are not going to regret.

Personal Chefs Speak: Tricks to Help you Eat Less

In a country where food is cheap, plentiful, and the choices are many, it’s very hard for Americans to control their eating habits. It’s like running on the treadmill while you watch the seconds passing by. The time seems to pass so slowly and thirty minutes never seems to end. So, what do you do? Put a towel over the timer and listen to music, which makes the brain focus on the music thus helping the time go by much “faster.”

The brain behaves the same with eating less. We just need to trick it or “put a towel over it” to make it seem that we don’t need as much food as the brain thinks we do. Atlanta Personal Chef Service is here to give three simple pieces of advice to help you eat less or lose weight without you even noticing you are doing so.

First, decrease the size of your plates. Research shows that people are prone to eat more (28% more) when using a larger plate. Why? Because they simply put more food on their plate and don’t want to throw it out due to the starving children in Africa. Also, if you use smaller cooking dishes, you will also cook less, thus not having to feel bad for the starving children and actually do something about it. You can save money by spending less on food then donate what you saved to charitable organizations that help starving children in Africa.

Second, change the name of a “normal” portion to a “large.” It will help you to take less on your plate and eat less, because your brain will think that eating a large portion is too much. Most people defer to the normal portion while picking a meal or drink because they think that small is too small and big is too big. Our society’s “normal” has been increasing and it differs for each restaurant, so who is to say what is regular and what is large? Drink and eat less by always sticking with small.

Third, rearrange the way you stock fruits and vegetables in your fridge. Research shows that people are more prone to eat their fruits and vegetables when they put them in places that are visible, such as the center shelf. This will help you to acknowledge that the food you bought is still there and you don’t want to throw money away. Filling up on healthy food will help you decrease the amount of unhealthy food you eat.

Atlanta Personal Chef Service is here to help you live a healthy life without giving up the taste of great food. We have personal chefs in Buckhead, Marietta, Dunwoody, Vinings, Roswell, Alpharetta and other cities in Georgia. Keep following our blog and continue getting great tips about food and heath. For more information, check out our website at: www.AtlantaPersonalChefService.com.

Grocery Shopping with Atlanta Personal Chef Service

Have you seen Atlanta Personal Chef Service's team of chefs shopping in your local Publix and Whole Food's stores?  We do most of our shopping in the early afternoon hours, so that dinner is ready when you come home from work.  But we also shop over the weekends to get the freshest ingredients for our dinner parties around Atlanta.

Take a look at the photo's below as we follow one of our Personal Chefs, Kym, who joined the Atlanta Personal Chef Service team in early January.  Kym cooks dinner three nights a week for a family of four in Buckhead.  With two working parents, and two school-aged children, there's just not enough hours in the day to prepare healthy, home-cooked meals as well.  But you don't have to give up that family time of dinner each night.  For many families, its the routine of enjoying a meal together every night that binds the family together across everyone's busy schedules.  Our service allows busy families to return to the dinner table, and create a lifestyle of eating together, and eating healthy, tasty meals.

If you'd like to find out more about Atlanta Personal Chef Service, please visit our website here.  Take a sneak peak into one of Kym's latest shopping trips.  Menus are customized for each family at the beginning of each week, and chef's bring the menus to guide their shopping each day.  Of course, we also always select the freshest ingredients, so you'll always see seasonal items on the menus.  Here, Chef Kym is shopping in Publix, but we also shop at Whole Foods, Harry's, and some specialty stores on occasion.