Sunday dinners, cooking classes bring everyone together

Published 2:13 pm Wednesday, September 7, 2016

BRANFORD, Fla. — Sunday dinners are very important to Laura Fowler Goss. After church, her family would always have dinner at Nana and Papa’s and that’s when she learned cooking could make people feel good.

Goss graduated Magna Cum Laude from Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Academy in Austin, Texas, in 2010. Now, along with running a Human Resources firm, she teaches french cooking classes around Florida, spreading the love for cooking she found around the table during Sunday dinner with her family.

On Aug. 8 she will be hosting French Cooking School 101 at the Suwannee River Regional Library from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. with more classes scheduled.

Growing up, Goss noticed her friends’ families would eat sandwiches for dinner around the television. But at her house, she said, the family came together every evening to chop vegetables and eat dinner at the table.

“We cooked together, we hung out together and that’s why it was a special thing,” she said.

Before cooking became a large part of her life, Goss traveled the state giving leadership presentations as a Future Farmers of America officer.

Then, after an unfulfilling semester at Lake City Community College, Goss got a job working for a long-time friend for Fabulous Coach Lines.

“From 2005 to 2009, I just worked all the time,” Goss said.

She worked so much in fact that she considered quitting her job. But her boss and friend convinced her to take a year off instead. So Goss took a year and went to culinary school.

She loved to cook, but went to school to actually learn how to cook, she said. At Le Cordon Bleu, she found her passion, and it wasn’t deboning or frying chicken. It was making food look great.

“The moment I fell in love was in Garde Manger class,” she said. “It’s cold foods. It’s all about presentation.”

Garde Manger, French for “keeper of the food,” led her to be a food designer, and when people ask her what a food designer does, she says they make food look good.

Once she graduated, she went back to Branford and working with her friend, who’s business had steadily grown while she was away. She started her own human resources firm, and on top of everything, she was catering.

Instead of catering for large parties or weddings, however, Goss could pick and choose her customers. She chose jobs that would allow her to design food and not fry chicken for 200 people, she said.

After a few years of catering, she did a two-hour long, eight dish demonstration at Lake City College in April of 2016. From there, people in her hometown of Cross City requested a demonstration.

She, of course, obliged and started doing cooking classes at the Cross City library. Her cooking classes are spreading.

The classes are a way for her to share her cooking experience and do what she did with her family with others: bring people together and cook.

“To tie it all back in with the family dinners, I don’t think people do that anymore,” she said. “By saying, ‘Let’s cook things together,’ you help people find the joy in cooking in sharing, and that’s most important to me.”

The Suwannee River Regional Library class on Thursday is full, according to the library. For upcoming classes or more information call the library at 386-362-2317 or email laura@fowlergoss.com.