Na is well-known in Norfolk for her cookery courses and also travels to showrooms around the country as an AGA demonstrator. And she's recently published her first book, the excellently-named A Little Bit Brilliant, a collection of 80 tasty recipes, plus clever kitchen tips and basic techniques.

We all get stuck in a cooking rut from time to time and the idea behind the book is to provide home cooks with the inspiration to expand their culinary repertoire and get people gathered around the table together.

While Na is a very confident cook today, it hasn't always been the case.

'I was always a bit of a rubbish cook,' she laughs.

'I grew up in the Borders in Scotland on a dairy farm and there was food everywhere, so I've got a really good sense of where food comes from - there were fields of cauliflowers in front of my bedroom window,' she says.

Na Hansell cooking. (Image: Contributed by Na Hansell)

'And I was surrounded by excellent aunts and there were always millions of cousins and fabulous Sunday lunches and food was definitely what brought people together. But like lots of my generation, we had to do maths, and physics and A levels and degrees and we never really learned how to cook - that wasn't what our parents' generation wanted us to be doing, so we just had this gap.

'When I got married and had my family, I followed recipes and they never quite tasted that great.'

Na trained as an accountant and went into commercial finance. Her career in food began when she moved into buying when she was working for Asda.

'I did fresh produce for quite a long time, and travelled loads and I loved that, it was like being the Man from Del Monte,' she says.

'In the summer you were in the UK in Lincolnshire and Devon and Cornwall and Norfolk and then in the winter you were in Tanzania, Peru, South America, Kenya, Spain, meeting all these amazing people whose life, like my parents, was just growing excellent food.'

But while she knew her produce, there was a missing ingredient - as was revealed very publicly when she went on the TV cooking competition MasterChef.

'I didn't last very long, because I actually couldn't really cook,' she says.

Na Hansell giving a baking demonstration. (Image: Kathryn Fell/contributed by Na Hansell)

'I'd never really learned anything........

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