As befits someone whose relationship with food is, by her own admission, "beyond obsessive", Niamh Shields has made food her life, with some success. Her blog, Eat Like A Girl, is one of the UK's most popular, with more than 50,000 hits a month. Not bad for someone with no formal training, only a hunger for knowledge and "exotic flavours".

The blog has taken her around the world but Shields, 36, grew up in Co Waterford, Ireland, the daughter of a master crystal cutter and a bank clerk. She moved to the UK in 2001 after leaving university in Cork, finally quitting her job in project management job last year after feeling "stunted". "I was having an awful day at work and just thought, 'To hell with it, I've had enough'. Cooking, and writing about cooking, to potentially inspire other people is what makes me happiest."

Consulting work helped pay the bills, and she began to sell her own food advertised on the blog at a stall in Covent Garden. Shields's signature dishes – a slow roast shoulder of pork with apple sauce in a homemade blaa (a yeast roll from her home county), roast shoulder of lamb with smoky aubergine and sumac tomato relish, black bean chilli with chocolate and a chickpea and chorizo stew – sold well.

Now a full-time gig, Eat Like A Girl was initially anonymous, with readers attracted by Shields's bold, unfussy recipes. There are jams, big-flavoured stews, devilled eggs spiked with n'duja (a spicy spreadable sausage), lots of slow-cooked meats and more refined things such as potato cakes with smoked salmon and cucumber pickles. She's a magpie: the recipes are peppered with influences from her travels, her Irish homeland and the different areas she has lived in. "I fell in love with all the little Turkish shops when I lived in east London. That's where I picked up my fondness for things like sumac."

Shields recently published her first book, Comfort & Spice, which, rather than being an extension of her blog, is a collection of almost entirely new recipes.

Her appeal is her lack of pretence. "I'm inspired by people like Eliza Acton," she says. "That timeless approach to cooking: wonderful produce cooked simply." And the writing – friendly, to-the-point and like reading an email recipe from a friend. She engages with almost everyone who comments under the recipes on her blog, too. And therein lies Shields's main ambition for the blog, and her book. "I am by no means a chef," she says, "and people think you need to be a really talented cook to make a good dinner. You don't. I just want people who were afraid of cooking to read something I've posted and just want to give it a go. If I can do it, you can."