With Ian Jeffery, our new resident food and cookery writer HELLO and welcome to "Get Cooking", the new weekly food and cookery column with me, Ian Jeffery.

As this is the first time out for both me and the column, I thought I'd take the opportunity to introduce us both. Therefore there won't be any recipes this week, but there will be from next week onwards.

Firstly, a little about me and how I came to be writing this. Well, I've been interested, nay, passionate about food for many years now. When I'm not cooking in my kitchen at home, it's the thing I talk about most, think about most and read about most.

And, as always, passions become all consuming and you end up in all sorts of situations. For my sins, I entered for the BBC TV Masterchef programme, and blow me, they picked me as one of the three contestants to represent the North-west in this year's competition. So that's it, someone else thinks I can cook too

If you want to see how I got on, then tune into BBC-I on Sunday June 1, around five-ish in the afternoon.

Less of me though. What about the column?

My mission is to get you all back in your kitchens and get you all cooking, and I don't mean reheating frozen ready meals or mucking around with jars of cook-in sauces; good as they may be. I mean real cooking, with good, fresh quality produce, creating interesting and exciting food packed with flavour and goodness.

I believe that many people are put off cooking as it looks too complicated and time consuming, let alone all the planning and shopping involved in buying the ingredients, and instead resort to convenience foods and convenience cooking.

But ready meals and the like aren't satisfying, they don't satisfy the appetite, the tastebuds or the soul, which is what food, real food does, without contest.

Over the coming weeks I shall be scouring the culinary A-Z, looking at a whole range of foods and ingredients and sharing recipes with you.

But I don't want it to be a one-way process. I want this column to be your column too.

So write in and tell me what you think of the recipes. Send me your favourite recipes and I'll try and include them. Perhaps you're having a culinary crisis. Write in, and maybe I can help.

So come on, get cooking. I'll see you next week.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.