Ready to find your inner chef?
Elaine Ho in the kitchen. — Picture by Choo Choy MayKUALA LUMPUR, June 29 — Coming back to Malaysia after living in Australia for 10 years was a big change! Ideally I was to find myself a job in the food industry but job luck wasn’t on my side. So after some research and encouragement from my family, I took the bold step of combining my passion in cooking and my knowledge in food science – hence the birth of Chopstickdiner.com!
The Malaysian culture of eating out on a daily basis (breakfast, lunch and dinner) has come to the point of being unhealthy. Traditions such as eating together as a family around the dinner table is also a tradition soon to fade away with people working long hours and always finding the excuse that they have “no time” to cook and would rather grab a quick bite at their local "chap fan" restaurant or mamak stall.
Look at the plate of mee goreng you just ordered and you’ll find that 95 per cent of it consists of carbohydrates and the other five per cent (if you’re lucky!) some proteins and probably some wilted vegetables hidden somewhere in those curly noodles. It alarmed me that people I know find it totally normal to eat all these “food staples” without knowing what goes in it.
I started Chopstickdiner.com hoping to share the information I learned from university plus recipes I have recreated with my readers, who are mainly from Malaysia. I’m not someone who believes in keeping recipes secret ... totally live by the motto that sharing is caring!
A good friend of mine from high school kindly offered his company’s services to me to build my website up from scratch. I sat down with his team, gave them the idea and briefed them the functions I needed and voila they came up with this excellent layout for my website, right down to the colours! It took some fine-tuning before the website was bug free and all set for my readers to browse through.
We have categorised our food recipes and have a keyword search on our site so readers can easily find the dish they are hankering to try.
I do almost everything on my own, from buying groceries for my cook-ups to meeting up with potential clients; it's pretty full on. A lot of people have asked me how I manage my time doing all this besides taking care of my daughter fulltime, without a maid. I tell them it all can be done as long as you plan ahead! It isn’t easy but I am working on something I’m passionate about so it helps.
Here's to hoping it will become one of Malaysia’s leading food portals.
