About
Food as memory,
kitchen as home
I'm Sarina. Baker, food stylist, food photographer, and someone with a healthy obsession with butter. I've been at this since I was nine, when my mom handed me my first cookbook and I never looked back. This is my record of kitchen adventures: recipes I've experimented with, flavors I grew up on, and the family memories behind them.
I have been at this since I was nine. My mom bought me my very first cookbook and that was the end of any reasonable hobbies. While other girls were shopping for clothes and shoes, I was curled up on the couch with a cookbook or standing in the kitchen pestering someone who was trying to cook in peace.
My favorite memory from childhood is being in the kitchen with my mom. She is the reason I cook, and she has been the most useful critic I have. My family is generous with their opinions, which is a polite way of saying they do not stay quiet when something is not right. I have always found this more helpful than politeness.
I started writing everything down as a personal record of kitchen adventures, the recipes I was experimenting with, the things that worked, the things that taught me something. What I thought would stay private became this. I cannot fully explain why anyone would want to read about my relationship with my oven, but here we are.
My cooking lives somewhere between the Malaysian food I grew up eating and everything else I have picked up along the way. Pandan and hoisin and wok-fried anything alongside proper pastry and a sourdough starter I have named and fed faithfully for years. I cook what I am craving, and the range is wide.
Every recipe on this site has been made in my home kitchen. Full stop. No test kitchen, no team, just me and whatever I happen to have in the fridge.
I hope you find something here that is worth making. When you do, I would love to hear about it.
My mom is the reason I cook, and she has been the most useful critic I have.
Seasonality
I cook with what is ready. Not what I planned on buying three days ago, but what is actually at the market, in season, worth getting excited about. Some of my best recipes started at a farmers market stall where something looked so good I had to figure out what to do with it on the drive home.
Tradition
The sight of my mom making pie crust from scratch, with her bare hands, is something that has stayed with me. My aunt makes a beef stir fry I have never been able to match. My mom is the reason I cook at all. Old recipes, and the people who carry them, deserve real respect. I learn how something was meant to be made before I start getting creative with it.
Generosity
I cannot make a recipe for two without it turning into enough for six. Something goes wrong in my brain around the measuring part. But I think that is the right instinct, because food should always have room for someone who shows up unexpected, or someone who quietly goes back for seconds before you have offered.
Simplicity
I have made things complicated for no good reason, and the food was always worse for it. The best dishes I know are not trying to do very much. Fewer ingredients, handled well. Most of the time, less is always more (a thing I have to remind myself every time I reach for the extra garnish).