about misohungry

I grew up in a home where love wasn’t explicit, but instead served on a plate.

My Singaporean Chinese parents weren’t the type to say I love you or pull you into a hug. Yet, there were dishes of home-cooked goodness every meal without fail. Steamed fish with ginger and scallions. Stir-fried leafy greens with wok-hey. San bei ji where you could smell the sesame oil from rooms away. Herbal chicken wrapped with lotus leaves and steamed till tender perfection.

That’s how they showed love. Hours poured into the daily meals, making sure we were fed, and fed well.

Now I have my own kitchen, my own rhythm of work and life, and I’ve become the home cook. Somewhere between marinating meat, slicing ginger and waiting for the oven beep, I realized: I carry the same values. I show love the same way.

But I also realised something else. My parents never wrote their recipes down. If you’re familiar with the term, they always went with ‘agak agak‘ (approximated with feel; just about there), with their recipes stored in their heads and hands. I thought to myself: one day, if I don’t capture it, it’ll all just be gone.

A project to remember the recipes that raised us

Misohungry is my way of honouring them; of cataloging the dishes that raised me—the ones my parents makes so effortlessly now, after years of honing their craft to feed us well. The ones passed down from my mother’s mother, my ahma. The ones my husband’s parents cook when we visit. Recipes that have travelled quietly from kitchen to kitchen, generation to generation, without ever being written down.

It’s also my way of making sure my future kids, and their children, can taste where they came from.

But it’s not just my family’s recipes.

If you grew up with a parent or grandparent who cooked with love instead of words, I’d love to hear from you. Submit your recipe—the one that reminds you of home, the one you’re trying to recreate, the one you don’t want to forget.

Let’s build a library together, of the real food that fed us, shaped us, and stayed with us.