Chef Jennifer Hill Booker mixes Southern Tradition with Classical French Technique

Chef Jennifer Hill Booker has taken her Southern culinary heritage, her belief in healthy, seasonal foods and her classic French training to create a unique cuisine — Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent.

Chef’s cooking style is a modern reinvention of Southern cuisine that incorporates the traditional use of seasonal ingredients, important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, with French culinary techniques she learned from her training at the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris.

Her first cookbook, Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent. (Pelican Publishing, 2014) includes original recipes that will help you create healthy, delicious meals for your family. Using Southern upbringing and French training as the basis for culinary exploration in her second cookbook, Dinner Déjà Vu: Southern Tonight, French Tomorrow, (Pelican Publishing, March 2017), uses one list of fresh ingredients to create two meals, one Southern and one French. Combined grocery lists provide time-saving tools for recipes from cocktails to desserts and everything in between

Who is Chef Jennifer Hill Booker? She’s an African American woman of strength and character who can creatively meet life and culinary challenges with grace. Her passion for the culinary world knows no boundaries from creating new recipes, to teaching culinary arts, presenting live cooking demonstrations, keynote-speaking engagements and in the digital world where she engages with her online community. Her focused attention to detail came through loud and clear when she was a contestant on the Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen competition food show. Life experiences have given her a special sensitivity to sharing her joy of cooking with others including single, working moms and military families. She takes pleasure in teaching people to cook healthy and delicious food. With her extensive culinary endeavors as a professional chef, culinary arts instructor and cookbook author, Chef Jennifer Hill Booker is like having your favorite chef in the kitchen with you! She is an inspiration and role model for girls and modern women who are balancing life’s many challenges.

Get Chef Jennifer’s recipe for Grilled Corn & Shrimp Salad with Lime Chili Vinaigrette in the new cookbook Toques in Black!

Chef Jennifer’s culinary path has not always been a linear one. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Tulsa before graduating first in her class; eighteen months later, with an Associate of Occupational Science from Oklahoma State Institute of Technology. Extensive travel while married to a United States Army Officer pushed Jennifer to blaze a trail that fit her unique situation-a female African American chef, living abroad. As a result, her culinary company Your Resident Gourmet was born. During her time living in Germany, Jennifer honed her culinary talents by providing cooking classes for both military and German families. She was also able to fulfill a lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris, where she once again graduated top of her class. Twenty years later Jennifer finds herself once again blazing culinary trails as she wears many culinary hats as chef, cookbook author of Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent and Dinner Déjà Vu: Southern Tonight, French Tomorrow, reality TV personality, culinary educator and business owner.

She is a Georgia Grown Executive Chef for the GA Department of Agriculture, the Culinary Explorer for the Georgia Department of Tourism and Travel, is the founder of Southern Divas of the New South TM Dinner Series. Chef Jennifer is an active member of the prestigious Atlanta chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier International, a member of SlowFood-Atlanta and of Atlanta’s No Kid Hungry Atlanta Society. Chef Jennifer currently sits on the James Beard Foundation Food Waste Advisory Council.

Weaving her love of traditional Southern cuisine with her belief in incorporating healthy, seasonal foods and her classic French training, Chef Jennifer created a unique style of cooking that she terms Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent. Chef Jennifer shares this brand of cooking through her cooking segment ‘Chef Jenn to the Rescue,’ on CBS46’s Atlanta Plugged In, many television appearances, with original recipes in such publications as Waste Not Cookbook, Southern Living Magazine, Garden & Gun and Essence Magazine as well as her Food Network debut as a finalist on Cutthroat Kitchen. Her website, ChefJenniferHillBooker.com provides information about healthy eating, culinary trends, travel, and recipes that reflect her culinary point of view of Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent.

Chef Jennifer spends her free time in her kitchen, garden, or the farmer’s market. She currently resides in Lilburn, Georgia with her two daughters Jenelle and Regine and their KorgieJack, Pudge.

Accolades

• No Kid Hungry-Atlanta Society Member
• The Atlanta Food & Wine Festival Advisory Board Member
• The James Beard Foundation Food Waste Advisory Committee Member 
• The James Beard Foundation Chef’s Boot Camp for Policy Change Alum
• Georgia Grown Executive Chef for Georgia Department of Agriculture
• Georgia Explorer for Georgia Department of Tourism and Travel
• Founder Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology’s Chef Jennifer Hill Booker Culinary Arts Scholarship