Chef Abra Bennett is a perfect example of the way that people find their way to personal cheffing along all sorts of paths. Having spent most of her adult life as a public servant in the environmental field, Chef Abra chose to make a career change, opening her own personal chef business, Rolling Bay Gourmet, on Bainbridge Island, Washington in 2001. As she puts it "My love of cooking had far outstripped my family's ability to consume all my creations. I wanted to cook new recipes all the time, but we just couldn't keep up on the eating end of things. And my dinner guests were always asking me why I didn't open a restaurant. But in a restaurant it's rare to feel the impact of your cooking on the diners, whereas now my clients tell me all the time how much my cooking has improved their lives. So now, as a personal chef, I get to cook all day long and make people happy. What could be better?"

Family legend has it that Chef Abra's parents took her, at the age of three, to a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco and ordered fried won ton for her. She reportedly took a won ton and dipped it into the hot mustard, licked off the mustard, dipped it again, and soon had a crowd of Chinese waiters watching as she polished off a whole dish of hot mustard all by herself. After that she forgot all about spicy food for another 30 years. She was born in 1950 and came of age with the TV dinner, which she loved as a child, as well as Cocoa Puffs, hot Jell-O before it set up, and peanut butter on French bread dipped in hot chocolate.

Her cooking career began at the age of eight, when she decided to prepare a surprise birthday cake from scratch for her mother. That was her first creation, Oatmeal Cake with Chocolate Frosting. Then, when she was 14, her mom became quite ill right before Thanksgiving. That year she made the whole Thanksgiving dinner, from turkey to pie, by running back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen, receiving and following instructions. She did most of the family cooking after that, although she confesses that a lot of it was of the tuna and potato chip casserole variety. However, her stepfather is Italian, and when he cooked he used plenty of what are still some of her favorite ingredients - olive oil, garlic, and pasta.

Generally, though, her family only ate white bread, preferred foods with cream, butter, and eggs (preferably all in one dish), ate instant mashed potatoes from a box, and their idea of a vegetable to go with dinner was frozen creamed peas. Naturally, as she grew up to be a young rebellious person of the 60's, living in Berkeley, she became a vegetarian and health-food-nut-back-to-the-land granola-eating-tree-hugger, and started grinding her own wheat with a hand mill to make bread, which she would eat with plain yogurt and a handful of raw cashews. She still hadn't discovered vegetables, nor rediscovered hot sauce.

Finally she got interested in nutrition, and for a while cooked only out of Diet for a Small Planet. Then she discovered the Vegetarian Epicure, and began to make healthy food that other people actually wanted to eat, and that consisted mostly of vegetables. A lot of her friends were vegetarians in those days, and they would have great veggie potlucks and feasts, at which she began to get a much broader view of what it was possible to do with food. This is when she learned to make sushi, and eggplant parmesan, still two of her favorite foods.

One day, after nine years of the veggie life, she woke up and being a vegetarian didn't seem to be the right thing for her anymore. She went to the butcher counter and wandered in front of it in a daze, trying to imagine eating anything she saw there. The butcher asked her what looked good, and she blurted out that it all looked awful. He very nicely advised her to start with a little fish, and thus she resumed her life as an omnivore, although she still loves to prepare vegetarian dishes.

From then on her cooking and eating interests have focused increasingly on ethnic foods of all descriptions. There are very few cuisines that she doesn't find interesting and delicious. Living in California a good part of her life taught her to love Mexican and all sorts of Asian foods, and now she'd be happy to subsist primarily on Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese, with some Mediterranean, Indian, Mexican, and Middle Eastern foods thrown in. For a while her credo was "the hotter the better", but while she does occasionally still eat leftover rice with Thai sweet chili sauce for breakfast, she no longer needs to keep a box of Kleenex on the table.

She loves to spend her free time searching out novel recipes and exotic ingredients, and testing them in her home kitchen, as well as on the more adventurous of her clients. As a result, she has an amazing collection of recipes and is always finding a dozen more that she just has to try.

She believes in the transforming power of food, lovingly prepared. When her stepson came to live with her at the age of twelve he ate primarily Spaghetti-Os. Now in his twenties, he tends to have brie and prosciutto on baguette for breakfast; she's obviously spoiled him, and likes to spoil her clients the same way. Chef Abra cooks with love, and it shows. As one of her clients said recently "We feel so nurtured by your food, it's as if someone's really caring for us."