Laura Calder; Food Network's French Food At Home, on stage at EAT! Fraser Valley

Witty and charming host and writer of Food Network's French Food At Home, Laura Calder makes cooking French easy, from bistro desserts to savory tarts to scrumptious sautés. Watch her live on EAT! Fraser Valley's Food Network Celebrity Stage as she shares her vast knowledge of French cooking and recreates some of her favourite recipes. French food is, above all, a state of mind: caring about the quality and freshness of ingredients, delighting in the kitchen, and indulging in the social and sensual life of the dinner table. Laura articulates this philosophy with passion.

Laura was born in rural eastern Canada and grew up on home-made bread, unpasteurized milk, and organic vegetables in a house built by her great-grandfather. Despite the exasperating kitchen, she loved cooking from a young age. She won first prize at a fair when she was six for her “chocolate cake with peanut butter icing”, and a few years later she pulled off her first multi-course dinner for her family: Laura got her little brother to serve it (wearing a tea-cozy on his head and her grandmother’s high-heeled shoes) and every dish on the menu contained cheese.

Languages were another passion from early on. She was in a French school programme from age twelve and later went to university in Montréal. As soon as she finished her degree, she bought a one-way ticket to Paris, where she spent a month going from pastry shop to pastry shop devouring lemon tarts. One day, she happened upon the famous kitchen shop, Dehillerin, and she was so awe-struck you’d think she had found Atlantis.

From Paris, Laura went to Germany for a year to study German while working as an au pair. She became obsessed with German baking, especially breads (those pretzels!). Then, she travelled for a couple of years, and finally realizing she should probably make something of herself, went to Toronto for a degree in linguistics, and ultimately to the UK for a masters at the London School of Economics. At the end of that year in London, she took all of her textbooks to a second-hand bookshop and traded them in for cookbooks, which she dragged back in crates across the Atlantic. And yet, the idea of a career in food never crossed her mind. she had always dreamt she would become a diplomat, but a light went on when her grandmother pointed out, “You are the most undiplomatic person she knows.”

Her career began, instead, in print and broadcast journalism, then switched briefly to public relations. The corporate environment was not for her: only a year and half into it she was climbing the walls, so she ran away to cooking school in Vancouver. That culinary degree led her to Napa, California where she worked for a wine expert. Then, while attending a food writers' conference, she met cookbook author and founder of Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Burgundy, Anne Willan. Anne hired Laura to move to France to work on cookbooks with her, and to help run her school after an intensive crash course in classic French cooking and endless grunt work. She stayed in France for seven years, working closely with Anne, and this is where Sshe learned so much about French food and came to love it.

When Laura wasn't in Burgundy she lived in Paris, where she wrote her first cookbook, French Food at Home (HarperCollins, 2003), and worked as a freelancer. She lived and breathed French food and all she wanted to do was talk about it. Her writing appeared in Gastronomica, Salon.com, Vogue Entertaining and Travel, Gourmet Magazine, The Times of London, The Wine Journal, and Flare Magazine. During those years, she also travelled throughout France and researched French food. She apprenticed in starred restaurants, pursued more wine studies, and worked occasionally as a private cook.

In 2005, Laura came back to Canada, and almost immediately met Johanna Eliot, the producer of French Food at Home. Exactly one year later, they were having a wrap party for season one of “French Food at Home”. They're now developing their third season (with season two airing this spring), and she is writing a new cookbook, whilst continuing to live like a gypsy, partly in Canada and partly in Europe. One of her New Year's resolutions for this year was "to declare home". So far no signs of that happening, but she'll keep you posted.