Giada De Laurentiis appreciation thread

[Canada]

Wikipedia
Giada Pamela De Laurentiis (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒaːda paˈmɛːla de lauˈrɛnti.is]; (born August 22, 1970) is an Italian-American chef, writer, and television personality. She is the host of Food Network's Giada at Home. She also appears regularly as a contributor and guest co-host on NBC's Today. De Laurentiis is the founder of the catering business GDL Foods. She is a winner of the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lifestyle Host and the Gracie Award for Best Television Host.

Giada Pamela De Benedetti was born on August 22, 1970, in Rome, Italy, the eldest child of actress Veronica De Laurentiis and her first husband, actor-producer Alex De Benedetti. De Benedetti was a close associate of Giada's maternal grandfather, film producer Dino De Laurentiis. As a child, Giada often found herself in the family's kitchen and spent a great deal of time at her grandfather's restaurant, DDL Foodshow. Her parents were married in February 1970 but were later divorced. After her parents' divorce, Giada and her siblings moved to Southern California, where they took their mother's surname. After graduating from Marymount High School in Los Angeles, De Laurentiis attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning her bachelor's degree in social anthropology in 1996.

Her maternal great-grandmother was English and her grandmother was British-Italian film star Silvana Mangano. Her siblings include sister Eloisa, a makeup artist, and brothers Igor and Dino Alexander II, a Hollywood film editor who died of melanoma in 2003. Her stepfather is producer Ivan Kavalsky.

Career
De Laurentiis studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, with aspirations of becoming a pastry chef. After returning to the United States, she became a professional chef working in several Los Angeles restaurants, notably the Wolfgang Puck-owned Spago. She later worked as a food stylist and was contacted by the Food Network after styling a piece in Food & Wine magazine in 2002.

Her Food Network daytime cooking show, Everyday Italian, premiered April 5, 2003. On Chefography, a Food Network biography program, she said she never wanted to be in her "family business" of show business, and that she felt uncomfortable in front of the camera when she first began hosting Everyday Italian. When the program first aired, the Food Network received mail accusing the network of hiring a model or actress pretending to cook instead of a real chef.

De Laurentiis began hosting Behind the Bash in October 2005. The program examines the catering process behind big event extravaganzas such as the Grammy Awards. In January 2007, a third De Laurentiis-hosted show, Giada's Weekend Getaways, debuted on Food Network. On this show, De Laurentiis travels to a featured locale (including Seattle, South Beach, San Francisco, Napa, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming) and visits her favourite local culinary destinations. On a November 2006 episode of Iron Chef America, De Laurentiis and Bobby Flay competed against, and were defeated by, Rachael Ray and Mario Batali.