About Me

love food
love to cook
love to eat
love cookbooks
love browsing in grocery shops + food markets
love cooking for friends + family, seeing them enjoy the food
love a large noisy dinner party
love experimenting
my name is Karen
it is my hobby + passion
however, i am not a professional cook
i am an architect + a designer
my passion for food + cooking stems from my childhood memories. this is what inspires me. i grew up in Malaysia, a culture of food. family dinners at home, being around the different cultural celebrations like Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, school canteen lunches, weekly trips to the night markets or outings to find + try the best laksa! we explored, as a family, driving far at times because someone told mum + dad about a certain place. i realise now, all these adventures allowed me to learn the importance of food + its cultural meaning - chinese, indian, malay, mamak, portugese - different people, different variations

i left home to study in Melbourne, Australia when i was 17. living out on my own, i had to learn to cook. that was when i started to pull memories of mom’s daily cooking to try out myself. i started exploring. trying to replicate many favourite dishes i had eaten for years, at home + out in restaurants. i also learnt a lot from friends, some who knew how to cook + some who managed to perfect one dish or had certain likings to weird combinations.

i have come far since those days. here i am now, in a new phase of my food passion. i hope you like it here. its my take on food; honest, handcrafted food. some is based on my childhood memories of local, traditional food with a twist. my hope is that when you see the food here, it gives you a tingly feeling of reminiscent of your own childhood memories.

an aphrodisiac in its own right