It's kind of fitting chef Sonia Thapar's cooking style is known as Indian fusion.

Considering she's a bit of Indian fusion herself. She looks like a Bollywood actress, but has an accent that clearly gives away her Northern Irish heritage.

An interesting combination, much like the food she creates, coupling traditional dishes with Indian flavours.

"It's a little bit of East meets West," she said, sitting around the recently remodeled professional kitchen built inside her Thornhill home.

"You take classic dishes and give them an Indian twist."

Stuffed chicken breast with a classic French sauce becomes chicken breast stuffed with basmati rice and a butter chicken sauce.

Traditional rack of lamb with mint jelly is brought to life in her kitchen with Indian spices and a mint chutney.

"Indian food is becoming more and more popular these days," she said.

Some think Indian means hot and spicy, but Ms Thapar insists that's not always the case.

"It doesn't have to be overpowering," she said. "The spiciness should be secondary to flavour and I think too many people use spicy to mask the flavour."

Ms Thapar moved to Canada a decade ago.

Married to a lawyer and the mother of an eight-year-old son, six-year-old daughter and newborn baby girl, Ms Thapar, 34, has always loved cooking.

A few years back, she started her own personal chef service dubbed Sonia's Spicy Secrets and more recently became president of the Canadian Personal Chef Alliance, helping market the services of more than 200 personal chefs across the country.

"Everyone likes to entertain their family and friends, but all the work and the preparation it takes to do that puts a lot of people off, so they end up at a restaurant," she said.

"With a personal chef, you choose the menu items. The chef does all the grocery shopping, provides all the equipment, prepares the meal, serves it, cleans up after and there is nothing the host has to do."

Unless they want to.

A personal chef can quickly turn your dinner party into a private cooking class and most are willing to pass few along valuable cooking tips.

Through her sales efforts and marketing savvy, Ms Thapar has managed to make personal chef dinner parties and cooking class packages available through Shopper's Drug Mart locations across the province.

But a personal chef can do so much more than teach and help you impress guests.

They'll help you do the prep work if you want to cook yourself, prepare you for a trip to the cottage or, for around $12 to $15 a meal, make it so you never have to cook again.

"People are working more hours, they're stressed out, they come home and the last thing they want to do is cook," Ms Thapar explained. "At the same time, people are more health conscious and the personal chef service provides the answers to all of that."

It's a business she believes is taking off and while she yearns to spend a bit more time in the kitchen creating, most of Ms Thapar's energy these days is spent helping the business grow.

That means public relations and TV appearances including spots on City TV, CTV, Rogers and more recently with food legend Christine Cushing on Food Network Canada .

"You can't just sit at home and wait for clients to come to you or log on to the website," she said. "You have to be out there."

Being out there means less time in the kitchen less and the demands of a family means when she does get there, it's not the gourmet fare one might expect from a renowned chef.

"Basically my kids run the kitchen," she said.

So what would chef Sonia prepare if it was just her, left top her own devices all alone in the kitchen?

The choice is a surprisingly simple bowl of tomato soup and a cheese sandwich, her comfort food.

'That's what I crave," she said. "I know it sounds silly."

Ms Thapar says she's thinking about opening a culinary centre to offer cooking classes sometime in the near future, but with a six-week-old baby and an autistic son, family is really the No. 1 priority right now.

Still, her passion for food remains.

"If you're not passionate about food, I don't think you should cook," she said. "All of your emotions go into the food, whether your angry, upset, happy or passionate you can really taste it in there."

The Canadian Personal Chef Alliance is online at www.cpcalliance.com Sonia's Spicy Secrets website is www.spicysecrets.com