Malaysian Chinese Kitchen Turns Five! – a review of our website’s five year journey to preserve and promote Malaysian Chinese homecooked food.
Today, by God’s grace Malaysian Chinese Kitchen Turns Five! How time flies when we are having fun! We hope our readers are having fun as well. Whether you are gawking at our food pictures, using the recipes, or reading our stories, we hope you enjoy every bit of it. Many thanks to all of you for your support and viewership. We are proud to say that in five short years, this website has become a go-to place for genuine Malaysian Chinese recipes and related kitchen information.
A Food Blog Dedicated to Malaysian Chinese Cuisine
Malaysian Chinese Kitchen came to be five years after our first website, Roti n Rice was launched. The older website featured many cross-cultural dishes adapted to living in the West. While many enjoyed those recipes, we found others from the Malaysian diaspora and the home country asking for the original recipes they knew from childhood.
A trip back to Malaysia in 2014 further confirmed that home-cooking was rapidly on the decline. It was being replaced by the eating-out culture. There appears to be a need for a website dedicated to Malaysian Chinese cuisine. We wanted it to be a touchstone for many Malaysian expatriates. With that in mind, Malaysian Chinese Kitchen made its debut on January 3rd, 2015.
The Goal of this Website
From its inception, our aim was to help our readers rediscover recipes from their childhood. We are thrilled to get feedback from many of you when such a connection is successfully made with the past through Malaysian Chinese Kitchen. With such encouragement, we rummaged through some of our family favorites. Two simple dishes proved to be very popular – Sambal Steamed Okra and Half Boiled Eggs!
Culture and Stories Sections
Another unique feature of this website is our Culture and Stories Sections. When planning this blog, we realized that food did not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a larger cultural setting. As such, we decided to included articles about the kitchen ware, festivals, and personal stories to provide a backdrop for the recipes. We are pleased that these stories resonated with the readers. The most popular story was the one on Malaysian Chinese Ceramic Ware. Many could relate to having considered what were once used everyday had become collectibles.
Malaysian Chinese Kitchen Turns Five! – Our Youtube Channel
We started the Malaysian Chinese Kitchen Youtube Channel from the very beginning. We are delighted that the videos have been very popular, with some of the simplest dishes having the most hits. How to Make Perfect Half Boiled Eggs and Sambal Belacan have had hundreds of thousands of views and counting. I guess the old adage “the simplest things in life are the best” holds true.
Dine Solo
Today, many people live alone. To cater to this demography, we introduced the Dine Solo Mini Series in 2017. Jon, our son contributes recipes to this Mini Series whenever he has the time. His most popular recipe is Rice Cooker Hainanese Chicken Rice for one. It is a wonderful recipe and we recommend that you give it a try. You can prepare this for the entire family if you use a big rice cooker and scale the ingredients.
Food Sharing
Remember how people used to share food they have prepared with their neighbors? Linda and I would like to believe that Malaysian Chinese Kitchen is our 21st century way of bringing “bowls of food” to your kitchens all over the world. Thank you so much for your support and Happy Cooking wherever you are!
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