Cooking up success in the kitchen

July 8, 2005

LYNSEA GARRISON\Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA -- Suzette Lord hasn't visited many foreign countries, but she has traveled the world through her taste buds.

The aroma of ginger, chicken and calabaza, a type of pumpkin popular in the Caribbean and South American, remind Lord of her family and home when she was a child, as do the scent of onions and garlic. She even misses her mother's handmade munggo, a Filipino dish, which she detested when she was a child.

Though Lord, a resident of Wasilla, misses having exotic, gourmet food with her family in Vallejo, Calif., she has fulfilled the role of a professional chef and has worked with international foods for about 30 years. She can prepare anything from Hungarian to Japanese meals without even using a measuring cup. She cooks from what she learned as a child with her mother, and not with a recipe.

"My mother is my inspiration," Lord said. "When I was a little girl, she would take me to any restaurant and we would taste like three different things. Then we would go back home and she would cook it just like it was in the restaurant. Having San Francisco as your back yard was a gift because the food was multicultural. That really helped me learn the difference in what makes a type of food the best."

Lord, 46, grew up with seven siblings who all knew how to cook well and had big family gatherings at the dinner table. As a small girl, she also helped run her family's perfume-manufacturing business. When she was 18, she moved to Hawaii for a short time and worked in some Korean restaurants, where she picked up different methods of cooking Korean food. After she lived in Hawaii, she moved to the South Bay area of California, where she worked for the Monterey Whaling Company and Los Altos Golf and Country Club. In her early twenties, Lord decided she wanted to do more with cooking. She moved to Napa Valley, Calif., where she acquired a farm and raised all the food she cooked with. She then catered and cooked for various events and restaurants.

"That's when I realized I knew a lot about cooking," she said. "I didn't want to go off and work for a huge venture, and Napa Valley was smaller and more intimate."

One of Lord's favorite memories of her time in Napa Valley was when she catered for a man named Bob Travers at Mayacamas Winery for a harvest party. She roasted two geese she raised, apples from her own trees and other vegetables and fruits for the event. When the harvest moon was rising, instead of Travers toasting the event, he toasted Lord instead, praising her gift of cooking.

Lord moved to Oregon, where she opened a cooking school called "Suzette's School of International Culinary Delights."

Lord then moved to Monterey, Calif.

She held cooking classes there until she moved back to Napa Valley and picked up with the Napa Valley Times and wrote recipe columns and restaurant critiques. While she wrote for the paper, she catered and held cooking classes. She also was in charge of service and buffet design at Meadowood, a prestigious resort in Napa Valley. She spent 15 years in Napa Valley catering, teaching, and learning about food. She was also certified by the Culinary Institute in food and wine dynamics.

Lord met her husband in California and moved to Alaska in 2001. She caters in the Valley and teaches cooking classes for Allen & Petersen.

She hopes to "find her niche" in the Valley by becoming a restaurant critic or starting her own restaurant management, consulting and training firm.

Lord is available to teach instructional dinner parties, cooking camps, romantic dinners and homestyle chef's tables, as well as other catering jobs and cooking classes.

For more information about cooking classes, people may call Lord at (907)357-0424.