Cookbook writer dishes on home
Makes most of kitchen and living area
Everybody loves food — food is the new rock ’n’ roll.
So says Calgary chef instructor, illustrator and cookbook author Pierre Lamielle, who thinks the city’s food culture is “emerging, and emerging very strongly. We’re stepping up and proving ourselves.”
Lamielle also sees collaboration within Calgary’s chef community being “really big right now. There are enough people going to restaurants supporting the chefs, so that chefs are able to collaborate. It’s not competitive — it’s more about sharing ideas and thoughts.”
Born and raised in North Vancouver, Lamielle attended design and illustration school at Capilano College, then worked in the newspaper business for six years in graphic design and illustration at the Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald.
Lamielle, who has “always loved food,” also wrote a cooking column, The Easy Cook, for the Herald’s Swerve magazine.
He enrolled in cooking school in 2008 at the International Culinary Center (founded as the French Culinary Institute) in New York City.
“I scouted quite a few schools, but it turned out to be the best school I found in North America,” he says. “It has a phenomenal program. All the cooking schools are based on French techniques.”
Lamielle landed a contract for his first cookbook, Kitchen Scraps: A Humorous Illustrated Cookbook, while he was still in cooking school. It won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Illustrated Cookbook in the World in 2009.
Lamielle was also the illustrator and editor of The Soup Sisters Cookbook, which features 100 recipes arranged by season. His newest book is Alice Eats: A Wonderland Cookbook, co-authored with Julie Van Rosendaal.
The book reproduces the text of the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and features recipes, illustrations and photos.
Apart from his cookbooks, Lamielle’s main business is his company, Food on Your Shirt, which combines the idea of food with design.
Lamielle and Candace Bergman — his “partner in everything” — design and print a wide range of cheeky foodie and food-themed T-shirts (visit foodonyourshirt.com for more information).
Lamielle and Bergman live in an 1,800-square-foot duplex built three-and-a-half years ago.
Question: Which room in your home is your favourite and why? Answer: It’s a combination room — the kitchen and living room. I have a nice big open kitchen, so I can have lots of people around.
It moves right into the living room, where my favourite thing in the house is a bookshelf made by furniture master David Kaufman at Junktiques in Inglewood. It’s beautiful.
It’s made out of old pieces of wood that were collected and repurposed into a dedicated cookbook shelf. I had it made in 2009.
Question: What activities do you and other family members do in this room?
Answer: We watch TV, we read cookbooks, and we also eat and cook.
Question: What is your favourite piece of furniture in this room?
Answer: Definitely the bookshelf. I also have a nice chair I like to sit in. It’s a leather wingback chair that makes me feel like one of the literati when I sit and read in it.
Question: What is your favourite piece of art in this room?
Answer: We don’t have much wall space because of the bookshelf, so we don’t really have any art in this room. The bookshelf takes up the majority of a single wall, and the other walls have windows.
Question: Who designed this room?
Answer: It was a collaboration between myself and Candace. We brought our two worlds together into our living room.
Question: Is there anything you would change about the room if you could?
Answer: No, I think it’s pretty great. Maybe for fun I might install a liquid butter tap, so I would never run out of butter. But I think this room is exactly what we want it to be.
Question: Do you think of it as exclusively your room only, or one shared with others?
Answer: I share that room with others. That’s the point of the room — the food is there, so people come.
Question: How long have you lived in your house?
Answer: Three years.
Question: What community is your house in? What do you like about the area?
Answer: We’re in Montgomery. The really cool thing about Montgomery is there are three parks surrounding the neighbourhood: Edworthy Park to the south, Montalban Park to the north and Bowness Park to the west.
Question: Have you seen your street and/or community change since you’ve moved there?
Answer: Definitely a lot of duplexes are popping up.
Question: What do you like most about living in Calgary?
Answer: I love the city. I love the food, I love the food community, and I love the snow. I love sitting in my wingback chair with a pot of tea while it’s snowing outside, and I get to stay inside.