by Natashia Meredith

Inventive dishes, warm smiles and home cookin' at its best. Simply put, the Happy Cookers Personal Chef duo - Willerre Doczy and Linda Ressel seem to have all the right ingredients for a nutritious home cooked meal.

Busy lives and hectic schedules often leave little time for families to sit down together and enjoy a healthy meal. "Everybody is busy and there are many young people who haven't been trained to cook." Doczy says. Luckily, St. Louis-based Happy Cookers is on hand to reshape our fast-paced and sometimes less-than-healthy eating habits.

Lifelong friends, Doczy and Ressel love cooking, and the reaction their special recipes received from their families encouraged them to try it on a larger scale. On June 1, Happy Cookers was born.

As a member of the American Personal Chefs Association, Happy Cookers tailors menus to each client's dietary needs and health requirements. It even explores aspects of each individual's diet, including allergies, food preferences and grocery budget. All of the ingredients are then hand selected from local produce stands or supermarkets and brought into the client's home and prepared as directed.

Dishes range from the regionally extravagant to traditional American Cuisine. Client favorites include chicken florentine, beef burgundy, and pecan-encrusted salmon. Seasonal cuisine, low-fat and vegetarian dishes are also provided. An excess of food is never a problem for Happy cookers-the company provides a freezer service for left overs, complete with reheating instructions-nor is clean-up. Doczy and Ressel leave the kitchen just as spotless as they found it. Happy Cookers charges an average of $10 per person, which includes from two to four servings per meal.

" I enjoy meeting people," say Doczy "and the satisfaction when someone says, "That was really food. It's so nice to sit down to a hot meal."

To contact Happy Cookers Personal Chef Company for more information, call Willette Doczy at 314-458-3159 or Linda Ressel at 314-503-0790, or e-mail inquiries to happycookersmo@aol.com.