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 Cook Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms
I'm in mushroom ecstasy as this is a banner year on my property in Michigan for wild mushrooms! My Hen of the Woods mushrooms have returned in abundance so I have been busy cooking and preserving ...
I am a somewhat recent convert to brining, considering my almost 40 years of professional cooking. I think it was about 10 years ago, brining started getting popular with home cooks as a technique to ...
First things first... no, we are not talking poison sumac! Secondly, it is extremely easy to tell the difference between poison sumac and Staghorn Sumac, Staghorn Sumac being the edible version. We ...
I have been growing a tremendous number of herbs in Michigan and experimenting with different preservation methods for them. It's been revelatory for me! Before I started drying my own herbs, I had ...
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 ...
