Ingredients Drive Bourget's Culinary Creations

For personal chef Elizabeth Bourget, cooking is all about the ingredients.

“It’s like a craft,” Bourget said. “What you have to do is focus on your ingredients rather than your recipe.”

Bourget, 53, owns Gourmet to Go, a catering and personal chef service based in Scotts Valley that serves Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Benito and San Mateo counties.

“What I like to do is find a recipe, brand new and seasonal, and change it for a catering business,” Bourget said.

Bourget gathers recipes from epicurious.com, Bon Appetit, Cooking Light and other online research. For example she coupled fondue cheese bites with peach tomato gazpacho to make a perfect pairing.

She has always been interested in culture, language and foods. As a student at Santa Monica High School, Bourget created a French Cooking Club inspired by her parents’ French Canadian heritage. Taking home economics classes, Bourget got a charge from learning how to make broccoli soufflé and quiche Lorraine.

During a six-year tour in Europe, Bourget studied different foods in Germany. She learned to cook Italian cuisine at Lake Garda in northern Italy and took a Le Cordon Bleu class in Paris.

A European-taught chef, Bourget adopted her interest in sustainable and organic food from the European lifestyle. “From living in Europe, I was always into farmers markets,” she said.

Focused on cooking with local produce, Bourget frequents the local farmers markets to purchase produce and new ingredients she’s never seen before. She finds a couple of recipes with the seasonal ingredients and adapts them to her personal flair.

She grows herbs and produce including zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce, peas and carrots in her own garden.

By using local and sustainable items for cooking, Bourget says, “I wanted to make a bigger impact on the world.”

Environmentally friendly, Bourget uses free-range poultry, natural beef and sustainable fish. Recently certified in scuba diving, Bourget dives for seafood with her boyfriend when she cooks for herself. For Fourth of July, she went abalone diving to make abalone fritters. In the fall she dives for lobster.

“The whole business was designed with green in mind,” Bourget said. 

Ingredient-lover Bourget doesn’t use white flour or sugar when she bakes. Instead she uses rapadura, an organic whole cane sugar that requires about half the amount as white sugar.

She lives to discover new ingredients to incorporate into her cooking, such as Himalayan pink salt powder, which infuses into the dish instead of having a grainy chunk of salt. Bourget also uses coconut oil in Indian-flavored sauces for fish and chicken.

Public figures love her cooking. Bourget has prepared meals for Debbie Reynolds, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix), and Andy Grove (co-founder of Intel).

“What has surprised me is the interesting people that I’ve met,” Bourget said.

She has cooked for some families for five years. She prepares meals two to three times per month and the families freeze many dishes for later consumption.

Barbara Liebeck in Gilroy only wants soups.

“I always make her four soups,” Bourget said.

Cooking for public figures, Bourget said she doesn’t inquire who they are because she is entering their homes and wants to maintain a level of respect.

“People really appreciate that I keep that low-key profile,” she said.

For more information on Gourmet to Go, click here or call 831-818-7532.