About Laura
An avid cook and foodie, I began in the kitchen at a very young age, watching those early cooking shows, then playing food host or chef on my own. I followed Mom around the kitchen, learning as she made delicious home cooked meals every day. For her, there was no line between baking and cooking. She was a fabulous entertainer as well. Growing up in the Midwest, I did all the typical things rural kids do: Home Economics, FHA and 4-H. I believe these early cooking classes laid a solid foundation for my trust in the magic a little sugar, flour, eggs and butter can create.
My culinary skills have certainly evolved since those days. From selling chicken pot pies out of the trunk of my car to teaching cooking on several TV channels, I hold a very hard earned Diplome de Patisserie from Le Cordon Bleu, Paris. My other classes have been and continue to be taken at The French Pastry School, The Ritz Escoffier, Paris, The Culinary Institute of America, Blackberry Farm, Anguilla, Bali, and Italy. I like to cook and bake a wide variety of international dishes, especially French and Italian, but I love to prepare regional U.S. dishes just as much. My favorite thing to make is bread. I have cooked alongside Patricia Wells, Rick Bayless, Marcus Samuelsson, Marjorie Taylor and Jean-Georges Vonderichten.
Culinary Classes
Fearless Cook offers a variety of cooking classes in the winter and spring. Some are hands-on, where the guests cook alongside Laura, others are demonstration, and occasionally Laura invites a guest chef. Private cooking classes are a great option for parties. Plan to learn a lot and have loads of fun! For private chef inquiries, click here.
About La Dolce Vita and the Fearless Cook
As many of you know, the Fearless Cook storefront closed her doors after 14 years. What a wonderful, robust 14 years it was! Let me tell you the background story of the shop if you don’t know...
I had been a stay at home mom since my oldest was born in 1987, after moving back to Indiana from Charlottesville, VA. I had been a history teacher, an epidemiologist, and a Neuromuscular coordinator at the University of Virginia Hospital, but I wanted to stay home with the three boys who were born pretty darn close together. When my youngest was a junior in high school, I thought, oh no! What will I do with myself when he leaves???
I got a very fun job at Williams Sonoma and that WAS satisfying! I worked a few days a week on the floor, and taught cooking classes there. I had always loved to cook and was a very good baker, so I also decided to start a little pastry business and call it La Dolce Vita. I wrote up about 50 items that I could bake well, priced them, and sent them to 100 people on pretty blue paper. In addition to the fledgling pastry business and Williams Sonoma, my friend, Connie, and I teamed up and made chicken pot pies, delivering them in the school parking lot out of the back of our cars. We made hundreds. It was an exhausting success! After a few months, I called the Board of Health and realized I was breaking just about every one of their rules, so I got a sweet little space in Roanoke and opened La Dolce Vita. We soon grew out of that and moved across the street.
Owning a business taught me many life lessons. One of the biggest being good can come out of bad if you simmer down and regard it as a challenge. One negative comment changed the course of my life. My children’s school was having a fundraiser and one item was a dinner prepared only by women chefs. I asked to be included in cooking the dinner. Initially they said yes, but a few days later I got a call that one of the chefs said she would not cook with me because I wasn’t a real chef. I was sad, mad, and hurt that the school didn’t stand behind me. Mind you, most of the women chefs weren't culinary school trained so I was befuddled as to what constituted her criteria for a "real chef", but oh well.
I decided then and there that I needed to go to culinary school to get some street cred. And why not the best of the best? I applied and was accepted to Le Cordon Bleu, Paris and began a three year odyssey of one of the hardest things I have ever done. The way they teach is very old school and similar to the military brigade system, where the chefs are always right. There is no room for error and no room for too many questions.
After graduation, my skills were so much better honed. I took the business very seriously. I bought a horrible wreck of a building, which my incredible builder, Max, took to the studs, remodeled it and moved La Dolce Vita there.
I have had the BEST employees, most of whom are very dear friends now. We have prepared and hosted many beautiful dinners, fun lunches and brunches, private cooking classes from people here and out of state, bridal and baby showers, private elegant dinners- just about everything related to food, but bottling our own recipes. (Which I have considered, believe me.)
However, it was time to call it a day. A few exciting things are on the horizon but they are still pretty nebulous right now. For the immediate future, we will still do cooking classes, dinners and lunches in my home. And the trips to Europe of course, in the hope I can increase them to two a year.