Santa Rosa TikTok chef shares ideas for easy summer meals

When Veronica Eicken was a little girl, instead of watching weekend morning cartoons like all the other kids, she was glued to PBS, enraptured by the culinary creations of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin and Martin Yan. Before she ever hit double digits, she knew she wanted to be a chef.

Sitting in the kitchen of her home in Santa Rosa’s Larkfield neighborhood, the 42-year-old chef described how she’d get dressed up, fill a wine glass with apple juice, a ribbon tied around its stem, and play restaurant, experimenting with whatever she could find in her family’s Sebastopol home.

“I would do some amazing things with top ramen and canned cream corn,” Eicken recalled. “I was just so desperate to do anything. I’d put whatever I could in the toaster oven. I’d put chicken thighs in there and just cook the hell out of them.”

Her skills have improved considerably since then, and she’s traded in the canned corn for the fresh produce she gets while working as a private chef on a Sonoma County estate, a biodynamic property complete with vineyards, culinary gardens and a flock of chickens.

Eicken has worked for the same family for 17 years. She cooks three meals a day, several days a week, and sometimes goes on vacations with the family, forging an intimacy that defies the usual chef-diner relationship.

“It’s vastly different from any other cooking position,” Eicken said. “These are customers that you care for. You love them. You’re emotionally attached to them. When good things happen, you get called when they want to celebrate, and you’re there when things go horrible and they need food to comfort them. You have a front-row seat to their life.”

In addition to making meals, summer is filled with other cooking projects, thanks to the garden.

“If the gardener brings me two humongous tubs of tomatoes because they were ready to be harvested that morning, then I have to clear the decks and I’m canning tomatoes that day,” she said.

When the family is traveling without her assistance, she keeps busy with kitchen projects like cleaning out the pantry and refrigerator, refilling and alphabetizing spices and dry goods and making sure kitchen equipment is in good working order.

Unlike restaurant chefs who receive accolades or at least top billing on menus and websites, the life of a private chef means toiling in relative anonymity. But that’s changing as chefs like Eicken turn to TikTok.

While she maintains the privacy of the family she works for, she offers a glimpse into her world, inviting followers to come to work with her as a private chef. “ChefV707,” as she’s known on TikTok, distills her days into short two-minute videos. She has more than 100,000 followers eating up her weekly adventures.

“The curtain of my job has suddenly been pushed back, which wasn’t the case a few years ago,” she said. She knew early in her career she wanted to be a private chef, even though there were few examples of what that path looked like.

Her parents didn’t quite understand her early passion for cooking. Her dad was busy as a landscaper and would eat whatever was put in front of him, according to Eicken.

Her mother, a schoolteacher, was born in Macau and lived all over the world before her family settled in San Francisco. Eicken said endless teasing caused her mother to become Americanized as quickly as possible and leave behind her cultural heritage, including its rich culinary traditions.

“Luckily, my grandma saw in me this interest in food, so she took me under her wing and began teaching me everything she knew,” Eicken said.

Her grandmother, who lived in San Francisco, convinced Eicken’s parents to let her come stay for the summer when she was 14, to attend a young culinary enthusiasts’ program at the California College of the Arts.

“I did not go to school and brag to people that I spent the summer cooking — no way,” she said. This was when the Food Network was in its infancy and cooking hadn’t become “cool” yet, she added.

“I should have been at gymnastics camp with all the other normal eighth-grade girls, but for me at that point, (cooking) was like an affliction. I couldn’t help it.”

Instead she was making dishes like goat cheese and spinach stuffed chicken roulade with roasted red pepper sauce, which was the final project for the summer camp.

Encouragement from a mentor

After graduating from Analy High School in 1999, Eicken entered the culinary program at Santa Rosa Junior College. An experience during that time reassured her she was on the right path.

She volunteered at a wine and food festival and was assigned to assist chef John Ash, who she recalled was serving a chilled pea and tarragon soup with crème fraîche. Her job was to put soup into shot glasses and garnish them, then give them to Ash, who handed them to attendees.

“At the end of the day he goes, ‘You know what? You’re something special. You’re going to make it. I see something in you,’” Eicken recalled. “I don’t think he realized how much I needed that, because I hadn’t heard it anywhere else at that point. I’m pretty much where I am today because of him.”

After graduating from the junior college, she returned to the California College of the Arts for more training. When it was time to choose locations for their internships, her fellow classmates set their sights on places like Paris, New York or four-star San Francisco restaurants like Gary Danko.

Not Eicken.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to go back to Sonoma County, and I want to work at John Ash (& Co restaurant, started by Ash), if I can be amongst what he’s built and everything he stands for and his food.’ So I came back to Sonoma County,” she said.

Wine Country cooking at home

Her upbringing and training in Wine Country is evident in her food and the way she and her family entertain.

Eicken’s husband, Nick, also loves to cook. They spend a lot of time on weekends with their 10- and 12-year-old daughters, cooking outside on their smoker or in the outdoor pizza oven.

For backyard entertaining, she likes dishes she can make ahead of time, like a corn and cherry tomato salad with feta or roasted potato salad.

“These are recipes that I give to my friends and family to cook,” she said. “It lets you enjoy your guests. It’s so Wine Country, I feel like. Just being on your deck with wine and a bunch of delicious grilled meats, grilled veggies and composed salads. Like, what else do you need?”

Both salads, she said, get better as they sit, making them perfect to take along to summer potlucks, beach picnics or even camping.

And while they’re elevated by her culinary training, there’s an element of ease and comfort that make them approachable.

“I love the complexity of a roasted potato. You get those nuances and textures you wouldn’t otherwise get with a boiled potato salad,” she said. “And that salad is really, really simple. It’s important to let the potatoes really shine.”

For dessert, strawberry cobbler becomes a show-stopper with her two secret weapons: milk powder and cornmeal.

“Milk powder adds flavor and tenderizes,” she said. “The cornmeal gives textural complexity. It’s nice to have that unexpected crunch.”

A theme through each of Eicken’s recipes is the use of lemon juice and zest.

“There’s very little that can’t benefit from fresh lemon zest,” she said. “It’s probably going to elevate whatever it is, whether it’s roasted veggies or roasted meat or a pizza.”

Another top tip is to season with salt more liberally.

“It’s so common when I’m doing cooking lessons with people and they go to add salt and they add the tiniest pinch and it’s so adorable. But I’m like, ‘That’s not going to do anything.’”

She also said don’t be afraid to cook at higher temperatures, especially when roasting vegetables.

“Crank that baby up,” she said. “Try it at 450. Put the sheet pan in first (to preheat), then put the veggies on and then put it back in and see what happens.”

Eicken’s TikTok videos are full of these nuggets of kitchen wisdom that not only help cooks make better meals, but also offer ideas for preserving seasonal produce and eliminating food waste.

With a casual, breezy style, her advice never feels preachy or heavy-handed. She makes cooking look fun, just like Julia and Jacques did for her. There may even be a little girl out there right now with big dreams beyond creamed corn and ramen, watching “Chef V” show her what’s possible.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.