Sam Gates

Food writer and author Sam Gates has cooked everywhere from local schools to the African bush. She’s catered for cub scouts, run cookery classes for corporate teams and charities in the UK and South Africa, and taught everyone from world-weary teenagers to the local Women’s Institute how to make their own sushi. Sam worked in TV before landing her dream job as marketing director of the UK’s first food channel, working with fantastic chefs all day before racing home to cook and write her own recipes. After leaving, she started her own marketing company, with BBC Food, BBC Radio and small food producers among her first clients. Her first family cookbook Food for Your Brood was published in 2015, followed by the hugely popular The Tin and Traybake Cookbook in 2018. Juggling family, work, life and cooking was the inspiration behind her third book, The Batch Cook Book and its budget-friendly, low-waste recipes. Sam has been batch cooking since she was a frugal student, and now, as a working mum to a hungry family (and even hungrier rescue dog), it’s become a way of life. Creating The Batch Cook Book during lockdown meant that Sam also became the book’s photographer, shooting the recipes on her mobile phone, and roping in the family as models, stylists and pot washers. Within a few days of publication The Batch Cook Book had an Amazon bestseller tag, and Huff Post, the Daily Express, Daily Mirror and BBC Good Food magazine featured recipes, as well as The Guardian, who said it ‘redefined the concept of batch cooking’. The Yorkshire Post included it in its ten favourite cookbooks of 2020 (alongside Yotam Ottolenghi’s Flavour). Sam’s fourth book, The Green Batch Cook Book turns the batch cook spotlight onto vegetarian and vegan recipes. It’s a collection of mouth-watering, make-ahead dishes that harness the dazzling colours and fresh flavours of fruit and vegetables. It’s vibrant, veggie-packed and full of life. Sam is a member of The Guild of Food Writers and works as a marketing consultant and recipe writer, but, above all, she loves to cook and feed the people she loves, which she does at any opportunity.