Chef Alli's Meal Assembly & Culinary Center

About Chef Alli

Native Kansan. Family Advocate. Entrepreneur.

For more than a decade, Chef Alli has personified healthy cooking and lifestyle, changing the way that many Kansans think about food. Always encouraging and educating busy families on the importance of eating dinner together, Chef Alli works passionately to advance two important initiatives: Cooking Fit 4 LIFE- Smart Strategies that Stir You! ™ and Dinner With Your Family Makes A Difference ™.

Chef Alli began cooking at age 4, though it wasn’t until much later that she attended the United States Personal Chef Institute in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, where she acquired her certification. Chef Alli was one of the founding instructors for Culinary Inspirations, a division of Kitchen Aid and was owner of Menu Makers USA. Chef Alli has also worked as a consultant for Great Chefs, developing and testing over 100 recipes for their travel program on the Discovery Channel.

Chef Alli was raised in the family business, Roy Frey’s Western Store, which was founded by her Grandparents, Roy and Lucille Frey, in 1952 and is still a thriving Topeka business.

Media Personality. Columnist.

Chef Alli is the Founder and CEO of Chef Alli’s, Inc., a small public relations firm. As a certified personal chef, Chef Alli has developed and tested hundreds of delicious recipes. Chef Alli has authored numerous culinary articles appearing in print and online and makes frequent radio and TV presentations. Her weekly culinary segment, Now You’re Cookin’, is featured each Wednesday afternoon on WIBW 13 News at 4. Chef Alli has become a noted expert in her field and is often called upon by the media as a culinary resource. Her monthly cooking column, Who’s Cookin’ Now?, is featured in newspapers across Kansas.

Culinary Instructor. Spokesperson.

Chef Alli is proud to work as a Spokesperson for Hy-Vee Topeka. She can often be found doing live culinary presentations on the sales floor as well as teaching culinary classes from her “stage”, the Showroom Kitchen in the Hy-Vee Club Room. Chef Alli team-teaches many cooking classes with the Hy-Vee Topeka Dietitian, Amber Groeling. Chef Alli’s cooking classes are offered at various times and dates each month and private cooking classes are also available for groups. Chef Alli combines her passion for food and people with her love of teaching, making it her mission to educate everyone that cooking to support a healthy lifestyle is essential and empowering!

Chef Alli enjoys affiliations with many community organizations: Jr. League: Happy Healthy Me - Kids in the Kitchen, Meals on Wheels: Sumptuous Settings, Kansas Family Partnership.

Speaker. Kitchen Crusader.

Chef Alli’s culinary key-notes bring a unique flavor of humor, charm, and zeal (plus meat-and-potatoes insight!) as she promotes the importance of healthy cooking and lifestyle. At her core, Chef Alli is a wife and mother first, so she knows the importance of quick and easy meal solutions for getting dinner on the table for a hungry family. Because Chef Alli understands the challenges and demands that busy families face in preparing healthy meals, she teaches smart-cooking strategies and shares her favorite culinary techniques for super-charging kitchens all across the land. Chef Alli unites her talents as a chef and radio/tv personality to share her message with audiences everywhere. She loves to add visual humor and real-life stories that truly resonate with her audiences, inspiring them to feel motivated to implement healthy changes.

Women’s Advocate. Connector.

Chef Alli’ real love is for speaking to groups of women, at conferences across the US to promote Now You’re Cookin’…..The GOGO Event. GOGO (an acronym for Gettin’ Our Groove On) is a unique married-women-only presentation combining secret ingredients, spicy recipes and relationship strategies for increasing awareness, passion and intimacy in marriage. Through the account of her own life-story, humor, and tears, Chef Alli encourages and empowers women to deepen their connections with their husbands, creating the intimacy needed to strengthen their marriages.

Wife. Mom. Farm Girl at Heart. Cowboy Lover.

Chef Alli’s lifelong passion for food and cooking began when she received her first Easy Bake Oven at age 4. Growing up on the farm, Chef Alli spent a great deal of time in the kitchen with her Mom and Grandmothers cooking, baking, canning, and butchering chickens for the frying pan – all good first-hand experiences from which many memories were made. Chef Alli loves cooking for her family; she and her cowboy husband, Pat, and their 3 hungry sons, Cliff, Miles and Wyatt, live in rural NE Kansas where they enjoy country living, clean air, and muddy roads. Pat raises cattle and their family also includes 3 quarter horses, 3 barn cats, 2 cattle dogs, 1 bird dog, and a mutt, One-Eyed Sally, also known as Max.

When asked to sum up her professional journey traveled to this point in time Chef Alli responds with this: “My career sprang up out of a love for food and family; this is what I enjoy most in life and I really believe that others do as well. Let’s face it, when you gather a group of people around a table full of great food, laughter and good times are bound to follow.”