Who are Cook for You?

Emma grew up on a farm in County Offaly and cooked side by side with her mother. Emma’s parents were a gregarious couple and it was common place to have friends over for dinner at weekends which would prompt a search for new recipes to try. Summer’s saw an influx of foreign students and Emma , being the eldest, was given the daily job as ‘chef’s assistant’ to her mother.

Her parents, to add value to the pigs they farmed, started producing dry-cured bacon and making sausages in the old back kitchen of their house. Emma and her siblings were encouraged to take part in the complete process, from the mixing of the salt and sugars for the brine, to vacuum-packing the finished product. So you can say that food production was a daily aspect of Emma’s life.

After secondary school and three months as a student nurse, Emma decided that hospital wards were not her calling and enrolled in a three month Cordon bleu course in Dalkey, Co. Dublin. This opened up a couple of years gaining experience in restaurants in Kinsale,Ballykeneely and onto Greece and America with snippets of culinary experience while interrailing in Europe and visiting cousins in South Africa.

In the early nineties Emma’s love affair with Tipperary began and she found herself travelling from her horticultural course in Louth to a farm near Fethard which happened to have both a very nice walled garden and an even nicer farmer. Herbs grew very well within the walls of the garden and before long Emma was selling pots of herbs in the Fethard country market. The course finished and Emma decided to stay in Tipperary and marry the farmer. A job in a restaurant in Fethard continued Emma’s culinary path until the first of her four children was born.

When her youngest was 10 years old, Emma set up Cook for You Catering with a friend. After 4 great years of fun and stress in equal measures, Emma took over the sole running of the business, while the friend pursued another interest.

Emma is now back living in the county she was reared in and is based just outside Shinrone.