CARMEL VALLEY — He has eight Emmys, is gearing up for a second appearance on the “Today” show and recently spent six hours autographing copies of “Just a Bunch of Recipes,” his inaugural cookbook in its second printing only a month after its release.

Despite all that, Sam Zien really is an average, everyday, run-of-the-peppermill kind of guy.

A self-proclaimed nonchef with no formal culinary training, he shoots “Sam the Cooking Guy” and Discovery Health’s “Just Cook This!” in the kitchen of his home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Carmel Valley.

Zien looked for a “regular cooking-show kitchen.” He visited friends’ homes and took fliers to real estate offices in Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe. “There was always something wrong,” he said. “It was a classic three bears — too big, too garish, wrong color tile, too many windows.”

Two weeks before the demo shoot, while jotting down notes at his kitchen counter, he decided there was no place like home. “I looked up and said, ‘This is meant to be a cooking show about cooking for regular people. I’m going to use my own kitchen.’”

Zien only made one small change. “If you were just flipping channels with no sound and you came across a white kitchen it would be a blur. If you came across red, maybe you’d stop. So I painted it red.”

As for recipe ideas, “it’s very much the chicken or the egg thing,” he said. “I’ll make hard-boiled eggs just to eat and decide I should do an egg show. Then I sit down and try and figure out what egg things I know how to make or I want to know how to make.”

Although he rarely cooks anything for the first time while shooting an episode, nothing about the show is rehearsed.

“I do no prep. I make sure I have the main ingredients. I always assume I have the other ingredients. Sometimes I don’t,” Zien said. “When George (Corrales) puts the camera on his shoulder and says, ‘We’re ready when you’re ready,’ that’s when I think about how I want to introduce the show that day. I don’t know what I’m going to say until I say it.”

The now-famous kitchen is currently undergoing a remodel, made longer by a contractor who went bankrupt after taking Zien’s money without finishing the job or paying the suppliers. That hasn’t stopped Zien.

They’ve done shows on the curb in front of his house, in a neighbor’s kitchen and in a 28-foot motor home. “The idea was to shoot all four segments while driving, but I got carsick after the first one so we had to park.”

Originally from Canada, Zien moved to San Diego by way of Phoenix, where he owned a frozen yogurt franchise for a few years. A five-year stint selling real estate led to a job at a biotech company. Still not content, he decided to try a travel show.

“I wanted to go back to Tokyo, where I had been a few years before. I wondered how I could go back as a job. When I exhausted all reasonable possibilities, like being a pilot or a flight attendant, I came up with the idea for a travel show,” he said. “Then 9/11 happened.”

The inspiration for a cooking show came while watching local chefs prepare fancy dishes on morning news shows.

“They were always doing complicated stuff because they’re trying to entice people to go to their restaurants,” he said. “I thought I could just encourage people to cook.”

It seems to have worked. And while Zien may have changed the way some people look at cooking, he insists fame hasn’t changed him. “I’m still stupid. I’m not any different. I get recognized constantly and it’s so great,” he said. “My fans are just so over-the-top nice. My favorite comments are, ‘I never used to cook and now I do. Now we cook as a family.’ It sounds so trite and corny but it really does make me really, really happy.”