We use cookies on this website to ensure its proper functioning and to improve the quality of our services. Cookie Policy
Amy Brassington is the self-taught cook behind @amyscotswoldkitchen, an England-based food page built around a simple idea: real food, made at home, that fits into a busy family life. Based in a small village in the Cotswolds, she began cooking in earnest when she had her own children and wanted to know exactly what went onto their plates. Over roughly two and a half years, that instinct has grown into a page followed by home cooks who fold her recipes into their own weekly routines. Nothing about her approach is complicated, and that is the point.
Amy has always loved being in the kitchen, but it became serious when she had her first child. With a house recently bought, not much money to spare, and a young family to feed, she started making things herself, including her own bread.
"I wanted them to eat well, I wanted to know what was going into their food and also to save money."
From there it simply grew. She experimented, looked at other people's recipes, made up her own, and accepted that not everything worked. That habit of throwing ingredients together to see what happens is still how she cooks today, and she clearly enjoys it.
Amy is a mother of three, and by her account all three of them love something sweet. Rather than treating that as a problem, she makes sweet things at home and keeps them as natural as she can. The day before we spoke, she had baked a banana and date loaf with a few dark chocolate chips through it and no added sugar, letting the dates do the sweetening. It is a small example of a bigger habit: taking the food her children want and finding a homemade version she feels good about serving.
Her tastes are not limited to any one cuisine. Amy loves food from all over the world and says that, given the chance, she would try everything a country has to offer, then come home and attempt to recreate it. A recent family trip to Malta left her taken with a garlic mushroom sandwich made with Parma ham and Parmesan, and her children were desperate for her to make it. She sourced what she could back home and turned it into a loaded focaccia sandwich that now lives on her page. Even when the result is not identical to the original, the recreating is what she loves.
Asked to name the one dish she would eat for the rest of her life, Amy did not reach for anything fancy. She landed on a homemade burger, a proper one in a homemade bun with homemade relish, salad, and cheese, ideally with chips. That answer sits at the center of what she wants her page to say. Pizza, burgers, cake, the foods many people have learned to fear, become something else entirely when you make them yourself.
"It can be a really nourishing dish. It doesn't have to be this feared food."
A pizza, in her telling, is an easy dough topped with homemade tomato sauce, some vegetables, and a little mozzarella. Made at home, with ingredients you can see, it stops being something to feel guilty about.
Amy was born in Manchester, raised in Cambridgeshire, and now lives in the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire. The food she grew up on was traditional English home cooking: casseroles, meat and vegetables, and the Sunday roast that remains one of her clearest childhood memories. That thread runs into her own home, where fish and chips is one of her children's favorite takeaways. She is working on her own version, still refining the batter for the cod, and it is in the pipeline for the page.
Amy does not follow a strict method. Her cooking flows out of daily life, shaped by what is in season and what her children are enjoying at the time. She tries to buy seasonal fruit and vegetables because she thinks they taste better, and she sources locally where she can, down to eggs delivered each week from a farm about four miles away. During busier stretches, like the end of the school term, she leans on quicker ideas she can film and then serve. The aim is food that does not feel like another job for a mother to take on, something homemade that still gets on the table without a full day of prep.
After about two years of posting in earnest, Amy has built something she values more than any single viral moment: a genuine community. Other mothers message her to say her recipes have become part of their weeks.
"They'll send me messages saying, we now make your cupcakes every week."
For her, that connection is the whole reward, and she credits the slow pace of her growth for making it possible.
"I think you build a community slowly and strongly."
She has had a couple of posts go viral and enjoyed it, but she believes that if everything had taken off at once, the same closeness would not exist.
None of this came from a background in social media. Before she started, Amy did not have an Instagram account at all, not even a private one, and had never posted a story or a reel. She had to ask her teenager how to do it. Her very first video, still up on her page, is by her own description a bit of a shambles, wires and tripod visible in the shot. She has deliberately kept it there as a marker of how far she has come, and she is still learning. The work is real: many evenings she is editing until ten or eleven at night, something she says only makes sense if you love it.
When asked what keeps her going, Amy's answer is immediate and singular: her children. She would love to turn what she does into a business, partly because she thinks it matters for them to see a parent working hard at something they genuinely love and building it into something real.
"Everything always comes back to those three. To my children."
As a matter of personal preference, she keeps her children out of her videos, but they remain the reason the page exists at all.
Amy's advice for readers is as plain as her cooking. Start.
"Have a go. Just start."
So much of what stops people, she believes, happens in their own heads. Make the first loaf of bread. Try the thing you have been putting off. In her experience, it is never as frightening as it seems, because people are far more capable than they give themselves credit for.
Amy Brassington's page is proof that good food does not require professional training, expensive ingredients, or hours of free time. It takes a willingness to have a go, and the honesty to show every step along the way.
Explore Amy's recipes chefadora.com/@amyscotswoldkitchen and follow Amy on Instagram at @amyscotswoldkitchen, where she shares simple, homemade recipes made for real families and time-poor cooks. Chefadora is proud to spotlight creators like Amy who are showing home cooks everywhere that good food is achievable, one honest recipe at a time.
Updated on 27 Jul 2026
Save recipes from anywhere, and get answers, swaps, and help as you cook.
