There are no fond childhood memories of food and dinner-table togetherness for sisters Margaret and Katy Chayka of Oasis Dining Personal Chef Service Inc. With a family of seven children, their mother was and still is a plain cook, and there was plenty of argument to be had round the table. Their father turned out to be the gourmet cook in the family, but not until the children were fairly grown and out of the house.

There were, however, plenty of creative opportunities to go around. “It’s hard to remember it all,” Margaret reminisces. “We knitted, made jewelry, candles, collected and tumbled rocks, we drew and painted…I was making my own leather shoes in the sixth grade. There was plenty there to get us to creative cooking eventually if we stumbled over it. Obviously we did, but it took a while.”

Katy’s eventual baking hobby was important enough to her to enroll in culinary school. “It was quickly disenchanting,” she recalls, “and there was a lot more dishwashing going on than actual baking. I didn’t get the same satisfaction there as in my home kitchen, so I lasted an entire month then said ‘good-bye’ to a baking career.”

When business took Katy travelling over the holidays one year, the task of Christmas baking finally fell to Margaret. She didn’t even own a cookbook at that point, but with a massive sweet tooth and a hankering, Margaret discovered she enjoyed baking, and there followed other desserts and dainty sweets to the point of obsession. Her co-workers were the immediate beneficiaries of an over-abundance of goodies. It wasn’t until the desire to cook ‘real’ food came along, though, that everything else fell into place.

Having lived together for years, it was easy for the sisters to decide to create some kind business together, and after a few idea starts and stops they found a ‘new’ industry: personal cheffing. After some practical testing on the same co-workers who had already enjoyed a taste of their acquired skills, Oasis Dining became official.

Knowing their similar-but-different personalities also made it easy to divide the business and cooking tasks; Katy prefers the quietude of meal services and tasks like accounting, chopping, and washing, and Margaret likes the frantic pace of dinner parties, plus the tasks of marketing and cooking – without the recipes these days.

Specializing in dinner parties and gift certificates leaves the sisters time to pursue other things as well. Katy is the owner of C-net, a web hosting and site development company. Margaret’s ‘other things’ include Into the Pan, a handmade greeting card company for ‘foodies’, and Bonedacious!, featuring organic dog and cat treats. “I wish I’d started all this stuff years ago” says Margaret, “because I have so much catching up to do! Personal cheffing taught me how easy it is to just go for it – a very important lesson, not only for me, but also for my daughter, who’s getting first-hand experience in self-employment. She’ll be making decisions about her own future in a couple of years, and of course I want her to be more successful than I could ever be!”

The chef’s goals for the next couple of years include a commercial kitchen to meet the market’s demand for meal delivery, serving the Twin Cities, Minnesota area where they live.