Merrilees Parker

Merrilees Claire Parker (born 11 August 1971 in Westminster, London) is a British celebrity chef and television presenter. She is mainly known for presenting television programmes combining food and travel (Planet Food and Full on Food) as well as various more traditional cookery programmes. Parker is also renowned for the menu she presented working for the pub The Lansdowne in Primrose Hill in London. Many of her recipes are freely available online.

Parker was already passionate about cooking as a young girl, at which time she helped her grandmother, who is half-Portuguese, in the kitchen. She lives in the United Kingdom and speaks French fluently. She is married with two children, a girl & a boy.

Parker has developed several career paths in parallel, mainly involving cooking.

In 1996, she began her career in television as a researcher on the BBC cookery programme Ready Steady Cook. She also researched for Channel 4.

She began presenting in 1997 on a television programme called Barbecue Bible, in which she was credited as the Home Economist. Parker became a familiar face as a television chef in 1999 on a long-running BBC series Anything You Can Cook, which she presented together with Brian Turner.

In 2001, she was the regular chef on the BBC day-time show House Call. In 2005, she presented the BBC programme Full on Food, together with Heston Blumenthal and Richard Corrigan. For this programme, she travelled to various cultures to sample their traditional cooking. Amongst the most memorable and inspiring locations she visited for the programme, Parker mentions Hanoi and Peru.

For the programme Planet Food, she made several more travel and cookery documentaries in which she visited one country or region per episode, met with interesting local chefs and tasted local foods. Inter alia, she visited the Caribbean, Germany, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Scandinavia.

Parker also co-presented Orgasmic Organic and Great Food Live. She appeared on Taste, for British Sky Broadcasting, and on Saturday Kitchen, for the BBC.