Island Cooking: Private Chef

Spending more and more time every year in Patmos, an island in the Dodecanese where we have a vacation house, had as a result to expand my culinary activities and horizons there.  The opportunity to work as a private chef on a Greek island has many benefits. It brings you closer to the traditions, techniques, and customs of the place. The ingredients you choose and their availability affect your cooking and recipes you can make. But also the clients, whom are mostly non Greek, often French or Italian, are difficult to please and it is a great challenge having to present and serve Greek cuisine to people who might not be so familiar with. Fresh ingredients are key, as well as a lot of grilling and cooking on coal, of both fish and meat. Sometimes it might be people who want someone to cook for them once or twice per day for a week and its mostly families who have rented a house on the island for their vacations. But what I prefer is cooking just once for a large group of people. What is really nice, especially with large families or group of people, is that you get at their house early after doing your shopping and you get to interact with them, they are always very friendly and laid back, they want to learn things and very often they end up cooking with you.  These cooking meanderings on the island every summer have made me re-think a lot my approach towards cooking and the added value of Greek cuisine as well as the many possibilities that Greek islands and Greek hospitality can offer.