Inside a Chicago Family's Weekly Personal Chef Service
Here’s how Chef Keenan Brackett feeds Caroline's family week after week – and expands three kids' palates along the way.
Keenan Brackett has cooked for Caroline's family every week since the first week of February. He knows what her three children will eat, what her husband Dave can't stop talking about, and which sweets land well as an afternoon snack without sending anyone bouncing off the walls.
He has never met Caroline.
They've spoken on the phone exactly once. Everything else runs through the app — Keenan sends the week's menu on Monday, Caroline weighs in if something doesn't fit, and that's the whole conversation. When Keenan shows up to cook, Dave is usually heading out the door. "Hey, the food is great. Thank you for everything," and he's gone. The kids gather their things and head off with the au pair for the day. The house goes quiet. Keenan starts cooking.
It works because the match is dialed in.
A wider world of food, one week at a time
Caroline and Dave are a busy working couple with three kids under ten. Their au pair handles language immersion with the kids — that's enough to put on her plate without asking her to cook for the family too. They eat out on the weekends. The other five nights belong to whatever Keenan made that week.
The brief is simple but not easy: cook food the kids will actually eat, but keep expanding what counts as "food the kids will actually eat."
"At first it was just cooking what I thought they might like and getting a feel for their taste," Keenan says. "Now we're really working on introducing the kids to new flavors, textures, presentations of different things."
Pasta bolognese stays on the rotation every two weeks — they're kids, and spaghetti is spaghetti. But around that anchor, the menu gets adventurous. Two weeks back, braised tofu. The week before this one, a Mediterranean trout served whole. ("Some people are strange about looking at their food or their food appearing to look back at them," Keenan says, "especially at such a young age. So I did cut the head off.") Chicken cordon bleu — Keenan's mom's recipe, the one he grew up on — landed so hard with Dave that he asked Keenan, "Whenever you can bring it back, just bring it back." It's on permanent rotation now.
A new sweet every week
Every week, Keenan also makes a new sweet for the kids. Caroline's only rule: nothing with too much frosting or icing, nothing that's going to have them jumping off the wall. The kids don't have a bunch of snacks in their home — this is what they look forward to.
So far it's been cookies, cakes, and small decadent desserts that are easy to eat after school. This week: banana lemon curd cookies.
The featured menu
This week, a small Mediterranean trip and a French throwback:
Whole roasted branzino with lemon beurre blanc. A Mediterranean fish that most home cooks haven't tried. Not very oily, crisps up beautifully, and once you pour a lemon butter sauce over it, the kids stop asking questions.
Braised short rib with whipped potatoes and parmesan-crusted zucchini. Four hours in the Le Creuset, low and slow in the oven, came out almost too tender — a couple of the bones slipped straight out of the meat.
Chicken cordon bleu with chimichurri. Mom's recipe. Crisped in a copper pan. Dave's favorite.
Fennel, orange segments, cucumber, and arugula salad with pine nuts and Greek goddess dressing — built to round out two of the meals as lunch the next day, or stretch the protein into a fourth dinner.
Banana lemon curd cookies for the kids.
The sourcing matters as much as the cooking
Caroline and Dave are particular about where their food comes from. Organic where it makes sense. Locally sourced meat. They donate to causes opposing industrial farming, and that ethos is non-negotiable in their kitchen.
So Keenan sources accordingly. The short rib came from Publican Quality Meats. The branzino came from Dak's Fish Market in Lincoln Park — local, very seasonal, some of the best seafood in the city.
The cooking matches the sourcing. Olive oil poured slow and steady into a fresh chimichurri. Sea salt scattered by hand over green beans. Carrots roasted until they caramelize, sealed warm into glass with a blue lid. Nothing rushed, nothing phoned in.
What Caroline comes home to
Four hours after he arrives, Keenan is gone. What he leaves behind is a fridge full of dinners portioned for the family, plus enough for two lunches the next day, plus a salad to round things out, plus a container of cookies for the kids. Every container labeled. Every label written by hand.
Caroline gets home from work. She opens the fridge. Dinner is handled. That's the whole point.
Want this for your family?
If you're a busy household in Chicago — or New York, LA, or Las Vegas — and you've been thinking about what weekly meal prep with a private chef could actually look like, this is it. We match you with a vetted chef who learns your family's tastes, sources the way you want, and makes Monday-through-Friday feel handled.
Photos by Xavier Taylor. Special thanks to Chef Keenan Brackett and to Caroline, Dave, and the kids for sharing their kitchen.
