Laird of the kitchen

Amanda Laird. Picture / Greg Bowker

Amanda Laird's meringue pie topping is extraordinary. It's thick and Arctic white, soft yet firm, with pale golden brown peaks cooked to perfection.

When quizzed about the secret to its success, Laird has the nonchalance that seriously good cooks tend to have when asked how they achieve something that seems natural to them.

"The key is the sugar - I just know when it's right. The meringue gets a kind of glossy look."

Still warm from the oven, her delicious caramel meringue slice was on the menu when Viva visited for morning tea last week. Like many of her favourite recipes, it's an oldie but a goodie. Her mum made it when she was a child.

"It was always my absolute favourite thing in my lunchbox."

Laird's first cooking experience was at the age of 6, making fried cheese sandwiches with her grandmother. Although a simple recipe - thinly sliced white bread with the crusts cut off, cheese, butter for frying - it's a dish that evokes strong memories.

"Every time I taste them I'm there in her kitchen standing at the stove. That's the great thing about food, it just takes you straight back to where you first tasted that flavour."

Laird's passion for cooking was fired by her precocious interest in Julia Child's television show. But the famous American gourmet cook wasn't her only inspiration. Her mother was such a keen cook she had a subscription for weekly articles by British-based chef, restaurateur and cookery writer Robert Carrier and Laird pored over his latest offerings before announcing to her mum what she wanted to make.

More than 20 years later Laird's cooking skills would make it to prime time television.

Fans of Taste New Zealand will remember her from her role as Peta Mathias' assistant on the popular show.

Mathias and Laird met when they were thrown together on a catering job, instantly developing a rapport that translated well on to the small screen.

However, Laird did not set out to make cooking her career and has never had formal training.

After graduating from varsity she headed overseas before homesickness drew her back from London several months later in 1994.

Soon afterwards an advertisement in the window of the Bayou Cafe in Grey Lynn caught her eye and Laird landed a job as kitchenhand.

She was given a good grounding in the basics by a Cajun chef from Louisiana, who liked to spin a yarn with each of her recipes.

"There was a lot of love in her food. And a lot of storytelling."

After a year Laird felt ready to take sole charge of a kitchen and moved to a busy cafe in Auckland city, the Black Crow.

"I chose to exaggerate my experience so I was completely thrown in at the deep end, but it was great. I realised then that was what I wanted to do with my life."

She spent a couple of years at the Crow, and then another couple at Auckland's New Art Gallery cafe where she was encouraged to experiment.

"I loved working there. The owners were interested in trying new things. They were bringing Maori and Pacific Island ingredients into a reasonably modern cafe experience."

From there Laird went to Ponsonby cafe Stella before taking a year off when her son Benjamin, 6, was born. After that, catering stints allowed her to juggle motherhood with her work on Taste New Zealand, and 18 months as food editor at Home & Entertaining magazine.

For the past 18 months she has been adding her flair to Onehunga's Ultra cafe, where she creates dishes made from organic produce grown by the owners' parents.

At home her entertaining style is casual. She doesn't care for matching the right wines with a fancy three-course menu. Fresh food and the right mood are the key ingredients when she and her husband Felix have friends over to their Otahuhu bungalow. "My idea of the perfect meal is always seasonal.

"The freshest ingredients cooked quickly or, in winter, cooked slowly. The meal would involve people, music, lighting, and storytelling. I like to invite people at 5pm. We usually start with cocktails and some tasty fritters with a dipping sauce and then the food keeps coming out gradually through the night until we finish really late with a brandy and some blue cheese."

In her role at Viva she wants to highlight the tastes and flavours of Auckland's cultural melting pot. "I would love people to be a bit more adventurous and not bamboozled by ingredients that are Asian, Polynesian or indigenous.

I would like those kinds of ingredients to be celebrated in an everyday kind of way."