Shelley has been teaching people to cook since she opened The Chopping Block in 1997. She spent 17 years as a professional chef, working in busy restaurants and private homes but realized her calling was to get other people to cook. Shelley’s unique concept of a recreational cooking school, gourmet kitchen store and private event business provides Chicago with over 300 cooking classes and private events each month. Shelley loves to garden and entertain for family and friends in her Lincoln Square home.
Recent Posts
How to Grow Horseradish
I love the pungency of horseradish but have found that here in America, we limit ourselves in our culinary uses of it. I think some of these limits stem from the fact that we haven’t had a lot of ...
Now that you know how to make pancetta, I wanted to provide a few tips on cooking with it and recipes that highlight those techniques. Although pancetta is edible in the same way bacon is, its high ...
What is pancetta? Basically, it is the unsmoked Italian form of bacon. Bacon is almost always smoked and has a salty taste, but sometimes it has a sweet and/or peppery taste as well. Pancetta is also ...
I was recently in the mood to slow cook a spicy batch of chili on a cold Sunday afternoon. I wanted to cook and have the smell of savory food wafting through the house. Once the chili was in the ...
How to Make Apple Cider Syrup and Turn It Into Pie
Close to 20 years ago, one of our former chef instructors Lisa Futterman came to work with a recipe she clipped out of a newspaper for an Apple Cider Pie. It was the craziest pie I had seen. She took ...
As far as I know, my dog Mica is not gluten intolerant, but I figure if I can easily make a treat for my dog without flour, why add it? I try and be very careful with what I eat, so it only makes ...
My latest edition on foraging and cooking wild mushrooms features a relatively new mushroom for me: the Puffball. I grew up hunting morels but living in urban environments for the last 30+ years, I ...
Growing up in Iowa we didn’t grow or use fresh herbs. I think many people especially in the Midwest never experienced them, at least of my generation. Once chefs and home cooks everywhere started ...
My fascination around what people eat when they are under the weather started when a beloved former employee of ours mentioned that she would make her husband a soft-boiled egg when he was ill. I ...
Sweet corn takes me back to my childhood more than almost any food. I grew up on a little acreage in Iowa and our mainstay was sweet corn. We not only grew it for ourselves, we sold it and traded it ...
