Introducing Tamsin

I'm a complete blogging virgin so it's taken me a while to work out how to do this, but here is my self-introduction at last...

What brought me to cooking? Well, I believe it’s in my genes – my whole family loves to cook, and food is a major part of our social gatherings, both the preparing and eating of it, and as a topic of conversation. I first learnt to cook from my mother, who is a very good home cook (although bizarrely she always defers to me now and gets flustered cooking when I’m around!). Moving on from the usual childhood baking experiments, as I entered my teens I started to cook whole meals for the family, mainly to support my mother who I could see was frustrated with her life. To cut a very long story short, for me, cooking for people is a way of showing them that I love them.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to make a career from my love for food; I divide my working time between freelance food styling (preparing food for photography), and recipe writing, mainly for magazines, although I’m currently working on my fourth cookery book. One of my areas of special interest is healthy eating, as I’m passionate about showing how easy it is to prepare low fat meals that taste so good that you don’t feel as if you are depriving yourself.

Secret passion? I’m another sucker for baking, especially breads as it always seems magical how a simple mixture of flour, yeast, salt and water can be transformed into a sweet-smelling, crackle-crusted loaf.

My values as a cook? Local ingredients take precedence over organic for me (although if the two can be combined, that’s the perfect scenario). Food made with love above all.

Inspirations? My mother in the first instance, then Delia Smith whose books were my cookery bibles in my early days (and still are much used now). You may never have heard of Delia, but her closest equivalent in the US is Martha – but minus the huge business empire and jail time! Since then, cookery writers such as Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden and Nigel Slater.