Introduction

I grew up in the kitchen. Some of my earliest memories revolve around helping my mother make pineapple tarts. Hands off the pineapple jam! Or flipping through my nana’s handwritten recipes, the pages stained with little bits of butter – mementos of the curries they helped to create. I loved helping around the kitchen. Not because, at the age of seven, I was terribly interested in the cooking itself; it was more about what I could sneak a taste of when no one was looking. My sister and I used to have a deal: she would get to lick the bowl clean, while I got the balloon whisk, its crevices hiding little pockets of cake batter. Cooking – and eating – is the one thing my family loved to do, and we do it well.