Your host
Debra Shapiro grew up wanting to be an artist, and majored in art history in college. This turned out to be the perfect background for years of restaurant work, where she discovered that cooking was her true art form. Deb calls herself a cook, rather than a chef - she did not attend culinary school, but learned her cooking skills at her mother's knee, and on the job in restaurants.
She is interested in giving people the chance to experience well-prepared, home-cooked food, by cooking for them, and/or teaching them to cook themselves. She's not as interested in pushing food to the heighths of up-to-the minute chefery, like cooking sous-vide, gels and foams and mists, or any food that comes on a specially designed device (more examples from Alinea); she prefers to leave that to others.
She aspires to be like Patricia Wells, rather than Thomas Keller.
