Miami celebrity chefs offer inspiration, and a good meal, in Camillus cooking program

When Vanessa Alonso isn’t studying to be an aesthetician, she’s taking care of her seven kids. And that involves loads of cooking.

Through the Camillus House’s CHEF Challenge, about once a month Alonso takes a virtual cooking class offered by established Miami chefs who volunteer their time and teach the class out of FIU’s Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

“The last one we did — oh, my God — it was delicious,” Alonso, 32, said, describing an Asian-inspired chicken dish. “They are so cool. You get healthy cooked meals in an hour.”

Alonso grew up in Miami and now lives in Homestead at Verde Gardens, Camillus House’s permanent supportive housing for families with small children who have no homes or or are at risk of homelessness. Alonso, her kids and her husband live in a four-bedroom home provided by the program, which also offers free social worker and counselor services for the families.

The CHEF (Cooking Healthy Easy Foods) Challenge includes Miami celebrity chefs Norman Van Aken and Michelle Bernstein. The chefs, well known for their high-end restaurants, are challenged with cooking tasty yet affordable meals that can be made in an hour.

Their budget: $20 for a family of four. For each cooking class, the families are given a meal kit with all the ingredients they need to cook that day’s meal.

“As a chef, we choose our job because we want to make people happy,” and through the program, “we get to cook with people who don’t eat the chefs’ dishes at restaurants because they can’t afford it,” said Amina Ly, a Senegal-born Miami chef who previously had a well-regarded French restaurant in Miami Shores called Côté Gourmet.

Chef Ly is loved among CHEF Challenge participants for her tropical pineapple pork recipe, but at first glance, this recipe and others, often elicit a mixed response from the Camillus House clients.

“Oh my God. Ewww. What is this?” Alonso said, her typical reaction to the chefs’ ingredient combinations. “But when you start cooking, and they tell you ... put this, put that ... the flavors just come alive!”

Alonso, whose children range in age from 16 months to 14 years, finds that the cooking classes give her and her family more than just a healthy meal.

“I love doing these cooking classes because it lets me spend quality time with my daughter and my husband. It helps us bond,” she said. “I promised my 6-year old daughter that she could participate next time.”

For those on the brink of homelessness, or already unhoused, just putting a roof over their head isn’t enough to get them back on their feet. Experts say the key is helping them build a home environment and teaching them how to live with skills and resources they may not have had before.

“Homelessness is a crisis, and it is solvable. Housing with supportive services solves homelessness,” said Marcia L. Fudge, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, earlier this year, when Miami-Dade was awarded a $21 million grant by the federal government to help fight homelessness in the county. Miami-Dade County had 3,355 homeless people as of August 2021.

How the CHEF Challenge started

What is today known as the CHEF Challenge started out of Stacie Archer’s kitchen in Palmetto Bay in 2020. Back then, it was a solo operation where Archer, a 53-year-old single mother of three, made cooking videos for her “Seven Plates” cooking blog, which offers “freshly recreated meals for the well-planned mom.” When she wasn’t working on her blog or taking care of her kids, she made time to volunteer at Camillus House.

“I was struggling on a tight budget and I knew it was important for my kids to have a healthy, warm meal when they got home,” she said.

She could only imagine the hardships the Camillus House clients faced when they also had dependents to take care of.

“I had this idea ... and I already knew how to cook on a budget,” she said of her inspiration for the program.

A year later, she got Van Aken to join her, and with the support of Camillus House and Florida International University, they launched the program in 2021. Together, they were able to quickly attract other star chefs to volunteer.

“Many of our chefs come from very humble beginnings themselves,” she said.

Through her time at Camillus House, Archer learned that their clients needed more than just a roof. They needed a home.

“It’s not just a house — it’s a life — and you’re being given another chance at it,” Archer said. “Now that you’re settled in your house, let us teach you how to cook!”

More information

For CHEF Challenge recipes or to find our more, go to www.camillus.org/ways-to-help/chef-program/ or visit camillus.org.