Tina Piermarini has had many lives. She’s worked as a chef at several restaurants.. She’s sold real estate. Today, she’s a bookkeeper. But whatever she’s done, at the heart of her home life has been her dinner table, where she has gathered with her family around home-cooked meals for almost 30 years.

“I love cooking,” she said. “I’m passionate about it. I like to sit down with [my husband] Carl and the kids and have a meal. I think food is an important thing in life.”

Tina still shares her love of food and laughter more than ever on “Tina Cooks!” a public access show run in 13 local towns, including Clinton and Lancaster.

The show began when Carl Piermarini, the executive director of Leominster Access Television, was looking for local residents to produce programming on Leominster’s channel 8. He asked his wife to host a cooking show — he had to talk her into it, he said, but eventually, Tina agreed to do four segments.

“After the first show, we knew we had something,” Carl said. “People were coming up to us in the grocery store, telling us they’d seen it and liked it. Then we decided to do four more shows, then 13, to make a whole season.”

Now, more than 50 shows later, Tina Cooks! is in its fifth season and has become a public access mainstay.

On a Saturday shortly before Thanksgiving, Tina was setting up to bake bread. The Piermarinis are high school sweethearts who have been married for 28 years and the show is a two-person, family operation: Carl is the cameraman and technician and Tina is the cook and star. The studio is her own kitchen, which gives the production a comfortable and homey feel.

“People have said they like that,” Tina said. “I’m not like those people on the Food Network. I’m just a normal person in my own kitchen.”

Carl said there’s a certain amount of prep work which goes into each shoot — clearing the kitchen counters, wiping the normal, every day smudges off the appliances and adjusting the lighting. Tina gathers the ingredients and her favorite tools, such as a particular wooden spoon and a flour guard for her mixer.

Before the camera rolls, Tina and Carl discuss the logistics of the shoot: Where she will stand, at what point he will begin filming and the basic schedule they hope to follow. But that said, there is no script: Whatever happens, happens, and if the phone rings, so be it.

“My family all knows when I’m filming, but you never know who might show up,” Tina smiled.

Professional food shows have assistant chefs helping, the Piermarinis explained. When a pie is put into the oven to bake, the chef is able to immediately show another pie as the example of the finished product.

But as Tina is a one-woman show, all the prepping and cooking is done in real time. That means that if one has to wait two hours for the bread to rise, the camera goes off.

 “We always have to think of how it’s going to edit together, so we always have to be several steps ahead,” Carl said.

Some of Tina’s recipes come from meals she’s been making for years, but others are recent creations. For example, she said, she recently incorporated some pumpkin eggnog into a simple pancake batter.

“I used pancake mix and used the eggnog instead of the water,” she said. “It was fabulous.”

Still, mistakes happen, and when they do, Tina sometimes incorporates them right into the show, telling her audience, “See that? That’s what you don’t want to do.”

On a recent show, she said, as she went several times from the fridge to the counter, an expensive piece of veal fell onto the floor.

“I looked right at the camera and said, ‘My floors are impeccably clean,’” she recalled. “Then I cooked it anyway. I got more comments on that show.”

The mishaps that are edited out, Carl said, often end up as a blooper segment at show’s end.

Though the cooking show is not a paid gig, Tina says she does have sponsors, which covers the expense of buying tapes and distributing the finished DVDs to the TV stations.

“Carl does the shoot just because he loves me,” she said. “I have the best cameraman in the business. If it wasn’t for Carl there wouldn’t be a Tina Cooks! I do it because I enjoy it — when I stop enjoying it, I’m all done.”

“I used to sell real estate and I would bake bread or an apple pie right before I showed a house,” she said. “It got them every time. They didn’t know what it was about that house, but they loved it.”

For more information on Tina Cooks, including ordering information for her cookbook, visit www.tinacooks.com. Christine Quirk can be reached at mothertown@cnc.com.