About Jun

I am one of those people who love buying cookbooks and read them leisurely just to admire the photos. I had never spent more than 15 minutes in the kitchen up to three years ago, for cooking up noodles. We grew up in a town where every family has helps for kitchen chores. And we did take that for granted.

When the unpredictable life brought me to live away from home, I baffled and confused and spent many minutes of phone calls to home to ask for recipes to cook simple dish. As usual I got responses such as “add a pinch of this”, “cook for a while” and the food turned out to be quite inedible.

That is what inspired this site. To share cooking experiences and recipes with the “lost generations” like myself, who have been spoilt silly by our families, who had never before need to step foot in the kitchen and had everything laid out on the table.

Not that we didn’t try to hang around kitchen, but our mothers or people who were in charge of the kitchen did find it irritating for novice cooks to mess their kitchen. I do get dirty looks from them when I take pictures of the pots and pans and cooking process every weekend. They think I should just watch television and come down to eat when the food is ready. That is jut wrong.

Also another thing about store-bought cookbooks (in this, I specifically referred to Indonesian cookbooks) is that they are one step away from being total useless. I spent time going through the recipes and instructions but most of them are not written well and clearly. Steps omitted, ingredients listed not mentioned again in the process. That is just plain irresponsible. This format of cooking recipes listed in food blogs are great in the way that it is interactive and you can actually ask for clarification and direction.

I hope you can find the same passion as I have found in cooking for people, both strangers and the ones you know.

About the photos

For the photography bit, I happened to have a decent DSLR of Nikon D80 to play around with. Another impulse buying of the fancy Nikkor f2.8/105mm that I now very much regretted. But it is a beauty.

I have not got enough talent to play around in Photoshop to prettify my images, so I tweak the photos taken using Adobe Lightroom.

About the cooking and the recipe

Most recipes featured are recipes made by our grandmothers, mothers and cooks in our family. I have to admit that they are not the easiest thing to cook, most of the time they just don’t seem to worth the time and effort spent. Especially when I have people breathing down my neck telling me “you HAVE to do this if you want to cook that” . Certain ingredients have to be bought in certain market, no other place sell the same thing they do. That ingredients could just be egg. And I am sure all eggs taste the same .. Hey, I am a novice.

I am in the middle of going through all the difficult recipes, and later I will try to develop new ways to cook those dishes. Cooking and eating is an absolute personal’s choice. Free of preaching. I can tell you how a dish is supposed to taste like and how it is enjoyed in our family. But if it is not the way you like it, or not the way it is prepared in yours, it is cool

About the Jun

I live in a small city in North Sumatra in Indonesia. There’s nothing much to do here but eating out and more eating out. But after 30 years, it is maybe time to start eating in. The city does have the greatest variety of Chinese food around, still untainted of other cuisines that seems to overlap each other in other area in the country.

Enjoy the trip to my kitchen!

Contact

andiesummerkiss[at]gmail.com