About T. L. Cooper

T. L. Cooper grew up on a farm in Tollesboro, Kentucky. She started cooking as a young girl standing on a chair to reach the top of the stove more easily. Her first cookbook was a The Little Witch’s Black Magic Cookbook by Linda Glovach. She studied the cookbook religiously and dreamed about making up her own recipes and even publishing her own cookbook someday.

While studying Corrections & Juvenile Services and Psychology at Eastern KentuckyUniversity in Richmond, Kentucky, she found creative ways to cook in her residence hall room and to feed her friends because she learned from her grandmothers that food was an effective way to express love and unite people.

She has lived in Kentucky, Ohio, Idaho and Oregon. She has worked as a youth counselor, registrar assistant, and temporary office worker among other positions. She chaired a writer’s conference for two years. Throughout she continued to explore cooking, cookbooks, and to experiment with recipes from around the world and finding ways to make them her own.

Extensive travel within the United States as well as visits to Germany, England, Spain, France, Jordan, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai provided her with rich opportunities to learn about different cultures, beliefs, and people while sharing their cuisines. She became ever more fascinated how different cultures combine the same ingredients to create unique results.

Adopting a plant-based diet and vegan lifestyle lead her to explore new ways to make old recipes and to use ingredients in new ways. After several people asked her to share her recipes, she decided to create this recipe blog, Vegan Cooking with TLC.

She published a novel, All She Ever Wanted, two collections of short stories, and her Silhouette Poetry Series. Her articles, poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared online and in print. She writes two other blogs, Write with TLC and Reviews with TLC. Her books are available through Amazon and her website.

Cooking has always been more than a means of making meals for her. She has often used cooking to center her thoughts and to figure out problems with her writing. Both really good days and really bad days writing often pushed her into the kitchen to either improve her mood or to celebrate by creating a new dish or making an old favorite.


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