Taylor Tan helps the aspiring chef through park district classes.

During her college years in Massachusetts, Taylor Tan lived on a dozen bagels a day, and never imagined that she’d end up teaching others to cook.

But the key to Tan’s transformation was this: She knew the taste of good food. Growing up in Taiwan, she enjoyed eating her mother’s delicious homemade meals.

“My mom would open the refrigerator and put things together into something very special,” Tan said. Though she’s now a skillful cook, her renditions of her mother’s dishes still don’t taste the same. “I think all mothers have their special touch.”

Her favorite dish was her mother’s “steamed egg cup,” a light egg custard with pieces of shrimp, scallop, mushrooms or cabbage hidden inside and steamed.

The egg cup is one of many dishes cooked in a bamboo steamer, the topic of one of five classes Tan will teach through February through the Bainbridge Island park district.

She has taught cooking for five years, based on her Asian heritage with her own creativity and always emphasizing the healthy and delicious.

Tan wasn’t always a good cook though.

As a college freshman in the U.S. – her first time living alone – all that her refrigerator contained was orange juice, ice cream and film for the camera.

Luckily, Gregory Glynn, her then-boyfriend and now-husband, realized what a terrible diet she was on.

“So I went regularly to his mother’s house and she taught me the basics, so I just started cooking myself,” Tan recalled. “After I started cooking, I started to miss the food I had had (in Taiwan), so I called my mom and figured out how to cook and gradually started cooking more and more.”

She was an adventurous cook, mixing and matching, and Glynn was a willing guinea pig from her worst concoction – kids’ yogurt with tofu – to her best, fresh fish simply steamed with fresh ginger, green onions and black beans served with a squeeze of lemon juice.

Tan read cookbooks, too, but they struck her as overly complicated sometimes.

So she would simplify the recipes and became quite an accomplished cook.

She was a fine arts painter in Seattle when she bumped into a neighbor in her apartment who lamented buying tofu because she though it was healthy, but then didn’t know how to cook it and ended up throwing it away when it went bad.

Tan showed her how to prepare tofu deliciously and the neighbor went away happy and told other neighbors. Soon Tan was teaching cooking classes.

“Through my own struggles, I help them take the mystery away and make cooking easier,” Tan said.

Tan says she emphasizes the basic concepts in her classes over following recipes to the letter. The dishes are also not necessarily Asian, many are Tan’s own creations, a combination of flavors from Taiwan and from living in the U.S.

A seafood soup she makes is a good example. Starting with a vegetable stock of ingredients like sweet potatoes and vegetables in the fridge, she adds salmon, shrimp and the decidedly un-Asian basil.

“I tried to put recipes together that were simple and healthy,” she said. “It seems people want to eat healthy, but just don’t know how to put it together.”

Ultimately though, Tan hopes her students will learn to cook like her mother did, without recipes and able to throw together a dinner from the ingredients on hand.

“My philosophy is a lot of people like to cook and people like to learn, but they don’t know how to start,” Tan said. “When people have a passion for cooking, it doesn’t matter how you put food together. You just trust yourself.”

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Taylor Tan’s single-session cooking classes this winter through the park district include:

Celebrating Chinese New Year on Jan. 25; Cooking with a Bamboo Steamer on Feb. 1; Use Your Noodle on Feb. 8; Stuffed and Wrapped on Feb. 15; Cooking with Sea Vegetables (seaweed) on Feb. 22; and Fancy Tofu Dishes on March 1. Cost is $20 per class plus a $10 materials fee. For more information or to register, get a park district catalog online at www.biparks.org or call the park office at 842-2306.