Welcome!

My name is Diana and I love to cook and share my recipes and ideas.

Food is an endlessly fascinating subject for me. I never tire of reading recipe books and trialling new dishes. My aim is to inspire people to come into the kitchen and cook something from scratch, whether it’s simple or complex.

The recipes you’ll find here are the result of a lifetime of cooking. I want to make them available for friends, family and anyone else who is interested. I have collected them from all around the world.

There are family recipes handed down from my mother and dishes that I have cooked often for my own family. Most of the content is plant-based. I love my fruit and vegies and herbs and believe a primarily herbivorous diet is a healthy one. We have vegetarians in the family and there are many lovely dishes for them. Other family members’ favourite fish and meat dishes will also feature. There will be cakes, biscuits and desserts for an occasional indulgence because I think we should all treat ourselves now and then.

I hope you will be inspired to try some of my recipes and let me know what you think by leaving comments here or contacting me on Twitter, where I’m @dianalampe.

Please visit again soon to see what’s cooking.

About Diana

Passionate cook and author Diana Lampe wrote a popular food column in Fairfax newspapers for nine years, between 2006 and 2015. Vegetarian Kitchen (later omnivorous and a part of the regular Cook this Week feature) presented two or three complementary recipes for dishes from around the world each edition.

Diana is not a vegetarian herself, but enjoys a predominantly plant-based diet and likes to cook non-meat dishes for her family.

She is also an internationally bestselling embroidery author, having sold more than 100,000 copies in total of Embroidered Garden Flowers and five titles that followed it.

Now a grandmother of five, Diana grew up on a grazing property near Coonamble in north-western NSW,  attending boarding school in Orange then Sydney. There she worked as a nurse, a library researcher and later editorial assistant in newspapers. She moved to Canberra, where her three children were born, and has lived there ever since.