It's Home Cooked Food, Just Not from Your Kitchen

Jennifer Swyer comes from a family of cooks, her mom, her dad, her brother, her grandmother, all experts at crafting fine home cooked meals. "And we were always trying to out do each other," she said.

After she got married and started a family, Swyer used her gifts to host sitdown dinners for 25 and big holiday parties with all home cooked food. For years her friends and family pushed her to turn her love for food into a business. Finally, last Christmas Swyer relented and started up Chloe's Kitchen, cooking and delivering family style comfort meals to residents in the Rumson area.

Swyer's daughter Chloe named the business which her mom does at a near by commercial kitchen where she rents space, while she attends Fair Haven Academy. Swyer and her husband also have a son, Cooper, 1.

Chloe's Kitchen serves about 12 family meals a week, most of them going to busy young families where one parent is working and the other is busy chasing after young kids. Swyer says her business allows busy families to still have dinner together without having to resort to fast food. Her clients also call on her to make meals for bereaved friends and those who've just had a baby, or even a working husband whose wife is going to be away for a week.

Patch also found a mom in Fair Haven cooking for her neighbors, but with a different emphasis. Like Swyer this mom cooks and delivers her meals but with a different niche market. This cook, who declined to give us her name since she works out of her home and not a commercial kitchen, prepares individual portion controlled meals with an eye on calorie and carbohydrate counts. She uses mostly orgranic ingredients and makes batches of healthy muffins for her clients each week. Mostly they are her friends who work full time. "Make me dinner, I had hummus for dinner last night!," this cook recalls a friend saying to her.

This business, which began simply with two like minded friends swapping meals that were healthy and diet friendly, now churns out about 15 meals a week.

"I've never been a believer in processed food," she said. "What you buy from a store is not going to be as good for you as something you make yourself."

Both women create a menu each weekend that they either email to clients or post it on Facebook. The Fair Haven kitchen's menu for this week includes chilled avocado soup with seared chipotle shrimp and turkey burgers with grated zucchini and carrot. Those meals are individual and cost between $10-$15. You can see Chloe's Kitchen menu here, which includes Citrus Marinated Chicken or Shrimp served with Red Rice, mango's and snap peas tossed in a honey soy vingareette for $45. Chloe's Kitchen meals serves four and come with a dessert like cream cheese brownies. On her Facebook page customer say things like, "The spaghetti bolognese is to die for!!!!!!"  "The chicken fajitas were delicious! Plenty for a family of four and leftovers."

Swyer admits that planning the meals, the big shopping trips and the bulk cooking (which includes feeding her own family) is a lot of work, with a slim profit margin. Still she says, it's gratifying work.

"I love to cook," Swyer said. "I get so much satisfaction hearing from my clients that they love the food, that their family enjoyed it."

Someday she hopes to open her own tiny restaurant with an emphasis on quality take-away meals. Some place you could go to get a big bowl of hearty soup, some crusty bread, "down home comfort food," she said. But right now she and her family are working on a giant garden so that her meals will have garden fresh herbs and vegetables. And thanks to four-year-old Chloe's addition, sunflower seeds.