Hello and thanks for stopping by! I’m Hanah and I hope that you, like me, love to eat. I’m guessing you’re here because you also love to eat the world.
Flavors You’re Likely to Find Here
When it comes to food, I’m an equal opportunity glutton. In my time on this delicious planet of ours, I have yet to meet a cuisine I haven’t liked.
Of course, I have my favorites. Vietnamese, Mexican, Japanese, and Ethiopian food are my long-standing addictions. But I also have consistent cravings for American (especially Southern comfort food!), Korean, Persian, Indonesian, Ecuadorian, and I can go on and on.
Whenever I’m about to visit a new destination, the thing that gets me most excited is what new foods will be waiting for my tastebuds. If you share that same passion for new flavors, I hope you’ll find some inspiration in the recipes on this site.
Why am I cooking?
As much as I love to eat, cooking has never been my forte. I’ve always lived in big cities offering plenty of diverse eats. I also traveled frequently. And of course, I was busy with work, life, the latest Netflix series, and so on.
But the truth of the matter is that I just wasn’t interested. My love is eating, not cooking.
Until a series of circumstances forced my hand. Several years ago, I became a mom. And poof! Bye-bye, travel. Bye-bye, free time. Bye-bye, disposable income.
All I was left with are the cravings. Oh, and a kid who is just as hungry as me.
I still live in a city with every cuisine under the sun. But gone are the days when I can nip out for a bowl of thukpa or scallop ceviche. I’m on a short leash. Plus, you don’t always want the typical restaurant options of a specific cuisine. Try finding a good sweet potato pie outside of America. Or a soul-satisfying bowl of dak kalguksu. Or that dosa wrap from the Yellow Flower cafe in Ubud.
There’s also the fact that I have a tighter budget now. Kids are expensive.
So I started cooking.
Here’s what I learned: I like it. Almost as much as eating.
In truth, I still have a love/hate relationship with cooking.
I love:
- the result
- the affordability
- the fact that I know exactly what goes into it
- the customization
- the very generous portions
- the fun of combining different cuisines
And of course, the empowerment of knowing I can cook pretty much every dish I love. No more restaurant dependency for this girl! It is an amazing feeling when you successfully replicate that one dish you’ve been reminiscing about from a little restaurant halfway across the world.
But most of all, I love the unraveling of every dish. Getting to know what ingredients it takes to get the flavor and why. Often, it unearths something about the culture in which it was created and that’s been the highlight of learning to cook. There’s so much that intertwines us all and nowhere is it more apparent than in the foods we love.
I hate:
- the cleanup
- the forgetting-to-pick-up-that-one-crucial-ingredient-and-having-to-nip-out-again
- finding room for an ever-expanding collection of spices and sauces in a very small kitchen
Oh, and sometimes, I resent the length of time it takes to put the food in my mouth.
That’s the main reason the pictures you’ll find on my site are not professional quality. They are snapped right before I – and my family – descend upon the food like a pack of locusts. The other reason is that I’m neither a professional food photographer or particularly good at pictures.
What You’ll Get Here
I am, in no way, a professional chef. I am, at best, a life-long glutton who will research, test and try every recipe obsessively until I know it’s good enough for me and my family and hopefully for you and yours.
I may not be able to cut onions like a pro. But I do a fairly decent job of presenting global recipes that are accessible to the average home cook. Because that’s exactly what I am. And that’s exactly what you’ll get here. Every recipe is written exactly as I cooked it. Pretty much every post is a craving followed and satisfied.
It’s all real food, cooked by a real person, in a smaller-than-ideal London kitchen.
And because I am an chowhound first and a cook second, I’m a big fan of trying to get more of what I love…while doing less. So if there is a shortcut to deliciousness – I will take it and tell you all about it.
So why am I going through the trouble of taking pictures of food I’d rather be eating and writing about it? Because I know there are people in my position. Hungry for more flavors than their current locale and situation offers.
And the world is too big to eat the same dishes every night. Especially when there is so much deliciousness out there.
Hope you’ll join me in eating all the flavors of the world from the comfort of your kitchen.
Love and lechon,
Hanah