About this place

I started writing these recipes down because I kept forgetting them. Not just the quantities — the things that actually mattered. The moment I realised the pomegranate molasses needed to be doubled. The afternoon a sambal turned out exactly right and I had no idea what I had done differently. The first time a chutney worked and I stood in my kitchen eating it off the spoon.

Most of these recipes are things I make for myself. I live in Singapore, I cook in a small kitchen, and I mostly eat alone — which is not a complaint. Cooking for one is its own particular kind of freedom. You can make the same thing three nights running because you like it. You can have just a bowl of something and call it dinner. You can go on completely unhinged ingredient spirals (walnut-pomegranate, tamarind-green chilli, kumquat-everything) with no one to negotiate with.

I grew up eating South Indian food at home and a fairly chaotic mix of everything else everywhere else. Singapore helped with that. You cannot live here and not end up eating and cooking across cuisines in ways that stop feeling deliberate after a while. So the recipes here are a mix: Levantine dips, Indonesian sambals, a Yemeni hot sauce, Indian chutneys, soups, roasted things, and whatever else I made that seemed worth remembering.

A lot of these are adapted from recipes I found and cooked until they became versions I preferred. Some are things I made up or cobbled together. A few are things I figured out by accident and then tried to reverse-engineer. I write about what I was thinking, what didn't work the first time, and what I'd do differently — not because that's information you strictly need, but because that's what I actually want to read when I'm looking at a recipe.

The site is called Dinner for Me. Most nights, that's exactly what it is.