Recent Posts on Home Page

I am using the following code that installs with WordPress on the home page to display the latest post. This works exactly as described including a Plugin called User Photo that shows a thumbnail of the author. My issue is that I I want to somehow tweak the have_posts aspect of the code to pull from a single category instead of posting anything newly added.

I have tried numerous plug-ins to pull posts from a single category put they all interfere with the User Photo plug-in.

Can someone please show me how or point me in the right direction to use the existing code but restrict it to a single category?

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
                                                        <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
                                                                                                                        <h2 style="color:#C15500;">Tips</h2>
                                                                <div class="info"><?php the_author_link() ?></div>
                                                                <div class="text_top293"><?php userphoto_the_author_thumbnail() ?>
                                                                <div style="padding-left:6px;"><h2><?php the_title(); ?>-</h2> <?php the_excerpt(); ?></div>
                                                                        <div align="right">
                                    <img hspace="3" vspace="3" src="/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar/images/list.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle" /> <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">full article</a><br />
                                                                        <img hspace="3" vspace="3" src="/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar/images/list.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle" /> <a href="<?php comments_link(); ?>">read users' comments</a> (<?php comments_number('0', '1', '%', 'number'); ?>)
</div>
                                    <?php endwhile; ?>
                                    <?php endif; ?>