As well as writing the popular Dinner Tonight column in The Times, Lindsey Bareham has authored 15 cook books, building a career out of making real food accessible to the most inexperienced cook. Lindsey, who first started as a restaurant critic, enjoys cooking imaginative, seasonal food with simple but explicit instructions. Here, she discusses her passion for all things culinary and why she loves turning ordinary ingredients into something special.

Your Dinner Tonight column in The Times is hugely popular - where do you get your inspiration from?

Dinner Tonight reflects my life; I cook every day for myself, family and friends and get inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. My recipes are essentially led by the seasons, mainly British seasonal food but my restaurant critic background ensures my cooking is international

in the real sense of the word. I shop at farmers markets, use a local fishmonger and butcher here in London and Cornwall but keep up to date with what is on trend with favourite chefs and supermarkets. I eat out a lot, particularly when I travel - just back from Burgundy, Lisbon and Cornwall, about to go to Greece, then Wales and Sardinia in September - and this is hugely inspirational. Inspiration, though, could just be a mention of an ingredient or dish on the radio. I just learnt, for example, that Erik Satie went through crazes for dishes made with ingredients of a particular colour - all white, all green etc - and I often do dinner parties this way with dishes like Red Fruit Salad or White Risotto. Leftovers too - stale bread and the remains of a roast chicken - feature heavily in my style of cooking. A most important point, though, is that everything is cooked and I write the recipes in a style that means anyone can achieve success. Often, though, I face a few disparate ingredients in the fridge and food cupboards and conjure something out of nowhere. That is possibly a favourite way of cooking; something from nothing.

What has been your favourite recipe so far? 

It's very, very hard for me to give a favourite recipe but I know that readers love inexpensive pasta dishes and pies, preferably made with puff pastry! I return to fish pie over and over again, ringing the changes with it but I also love meatballs and make them differently all the time.

You've written 15 cook books - how did your love affair with food begin?

I think my love affair with food really kicked in after my first French holiday when I was about 12 or 13. I was gobsmacked by the beautiful displays of food in the shops and particularly remember seeing stuffed tomatoes just out of the oven at the South of France campsite where we stayed. I'd never seen anything so beautiful, the top slice of the tomato with the stalk perched over a tower of mince poking out of the big, squashy tomatoes! I taught myself to cook  seriously when I became a restaurant critic by default (in the early days of Time Out) and later, on request from an editor at Penguin who came for a drink at my house with a friend of my husband and stayed for dinner, wrote a synopsis for In Praise of the Potato.

Talk us through some of the feedback you've received.

I get thank you feed back far, far more than disaster feedback, although occasionally a missing bit of info causes emergency emails. I can honestly say that I have never had an outright failure reported back to me. Many people begin their emails saying that Dinner Tonight is the first thing they turn to when they get the paper. Times readers are very appreciative and sometimes share how such and such a recipe has become a family favourite.

They say everyone should be able to cook at least five dishes - what should these be?

Five dishes: ragu, fish pie, tomato sauce, roast chicken and soup-cum-stew; all things that can be varied and/or lead to other dishes.