Meals and deals

Caterer delivers homemade wholesome
eats to your door cheap

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Joann Willes

Age: 47

Occupation: Caterer

Bio: This civic-minded McGill ghetto do-gooder has been “experimenting” with food ever since acquiring her first light-bulb-powered Easybake oven at age seven. Upon graduating high school, Joann was all set to attend Ryerson’s theatre production program, but after landing a job as a salad prep cook in a small Ottawa restaurant and being promoted to sous-chef less than three months later, she recognized the kitchen was her natural calling and left the theatre behind to pursue a career as a kickass chef. By the late ’80s, however, the topsy-turvy chef’s lifestyle was wearing her down to the point that she started getting panic attacks, so in the determined effort “to lead a less stressful life,” she relocated to Montreal from the nation’s capital to eventually open her catering business, Chantilly’s, an immediate hit which has been going strong for 14 years now. With an emphasis on healthy dishes “that taste good,” Joann says 70 per cent of her business these days comes via her weekly menu, sent out to a lengthy list of e-mail subscribers, many of whom eat her “healthy, large-portioned, low-priced” grub pretty well exclusively. To get yourself on said list, go to chantillyjw.wordpress.com.

Isn’t having a professional caterer provide all your meals somewhat extravagant? “Not really. We keep our prices really low because I work with whatever is on special at Metro or Provigo that week. A carnivorous main course is at most $9.50 and our portions are very generous. It costs maybe $100–$150 a week for those who eat our food every day. We use only whole grains, make our stocks and broths from scratch, and cook all our own legumes to control the sodium levels while at the same time lessening our environmental impact, which is very important to us. We’re trying to keep our carbon footprint a dainty stiletto rather than a work boot. And we’re conscious of certain people’s needs, like, we make delicious meals for people who are glucose or lactose intolerant. People really appreciate it because finding food that’s truly glucose-free is very difficult.”

Something else she’s done: A longtime volunteer with various HIV/AIDS organizations like ACCM, back in the ’90s Joann wrote and published, along with an equally concerned nutritionist, a 300-page cook/recipe book for AIDS sufferers called Eat Healthy, Die Anyway, although later re-titled Positively Delicious, “because people felt the original title was just too dark.”

Given how AIDS will weaken a person, did most of her cooking tips involve microwaving frozen dinners? “Not exactly, but we showed how you could prepare one thing that would yield four different meals, with chapters dealing with loss of appetite, stuff like that. It got fairly extensive. I’d love to someday work with somebody to revise and expand it. Huge strides have been made with respect to HIV and nutrition since then.”

Another thing she does: “I’m always taking in sick stray cats—and stray people. At one point, we had two rabbits and seven kitties living here, four with diabetes, one was blind while another had liver disease. It’s been a real zoo here sometimes.”

Last book read: Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery.

Musical preferences: Chemical Brothers, Lemon Jelly, Nick Drake.

Words of wisdom: “If I want diamonds, I can’t settle for coal.”

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