Whenever I say that I've been robbed of cultural history - it's really cooking heritage that I mean. It's difficult to understand your familial past when you just don't have that much taste memory to go from. So what do you do? I suppose you build your own.

So I was born in Singapore. And my family has a difficult culinary history to explain. Why you might ask? Well, take 1 part liberation of women from domesticity, 2 parts working parents, 1 part domineering matriarch from the previous generation and add the all important ingredient of ready to eat, pre-cooked, flash fried food from giant food conglomerate employing my father and you pretty much have what my culinary experience was like growing up. On the one hand you have my mother who never entered the kitchen. Not her fault really, she was the scholarly type – and my grandmother is a stickler for the particular mores of penang-perankan cuisine. This is the woman who once told me that my onion cutting technique was unrefined…. you get the picture. So my culinary memories of my mother include:

1. maggi instant mee chicken flavour, with or without egg

2. spaghetti bolognese: more maggi instant mee with canned leggo's sauce with extra ground beef

3. shepherd's pie: mashed potatoes, ground beef with a special sauce mix

4. chicken casserole: I don't remember how this was made, just that it was very very white. Don't ask.

5. And a plethora of snacks purchased from the little shops surrounding our apartment: curry puffs, breaded meat dumplings, rice dumplings and my absolute favourite – strawberry tarts.

And my dad? Well aside from the fact that he eats almost everything with great relish most of the time – I think I've inherited my love of stinky cheese from him. I remember the first time an air stewardess aunt flew into town bearing my first truly odourous taste of potted stilton. mmmm…. I wonder whether we still have the porcelain jar that it came in, that even my fastidious grandmother could not wash the smell out of. I remember always loving cheese, even folding those plasticky slices of kraft into little cubes to make them more palatable, and hankering for the tranches of la vache qui rit, the ultimate in gourmandisse back then.

As for my grandmother what can I say. I think my relationship with her defines my love hate relationship with Asian food. On the one hand it's comforting, but on the other it's fraught with all kinds of emotional blackmail and culinary stress. My grandmother specialises in soups – the slow simmered kind with pork ribs, chicken, salted vegetables, corn, lotus root – anything that requires a lot of preparation and attention. She is also the queen of the perfectly cut vegetable, tuber root, etc, you get the idea. Also her idea of fun is to spend an inordinate amount of time deboning fish to use in one her other specialities: Penang laksa. For the uninitiated that's a lemongrass infused, spicy rice noodle soup dish chockful of mackerel and torch ginger bud garnish. Yummy, but akin to preparing a complicated French restaurant classic.

Growing up with "Ahma" also meant that I enjoyed her repertoire of Anglophone dishes. These were part of the legacy of her marriage with my grandfather who loved all things British including cricket, tennis and a good old fashioned chicken stew. Of course, it had to be translated into the Peranakan kitchen. So my grandmother's stew also has an abundance of cinammon, star anise, pepper corns and nutmeg. Whole, in the soup, to be fished out at the bottom of a pot in a heady, intense spice rush. Let's not even start on her pork cutlets.

But really, I like to think that the beginning of my culinary life really began in my second year in college. Well, perhaps my first summer in the United States when I was living by myself in a yucky dorm in Manhattan. I was started to grocery shop for myself and attempt dishes from my childhood at varying degrees of success. I think I actually felt homesick. And then there was the revelation of hanging out with my newly acquired friend A – who had spent most of her teenage years in Paris and had food inclined parents who introduced me to the whole new world of cured meats, mozarella cheese-tomato hors d'oeuvres and the all important creme brule blowtorch! A, meanwhile, she definitely made me a die hard fan of plain yoghurt (it goes with everything!)

Then there was really going to France for the first time in my life – pilgrimages when you are eleven do not count, especially when accompanied by tomato hating grandmothers. Specifically the south of france where suddenly everything tastes better, more vivid – even maggi moussaka! What is it about that first trip to the outskirts of Toulouse? I don't know. Maybe it was the pairing of zucchini with rice (I had never had the vegetable before!) or couscous cooked by a Basque or how I can barely remember what I ate, just that it tasted good and the company was good and that was why it was so full of happiness.

Then of course, predictably, I fell in love and had to live with and cook for a vegan who turned vegetarian who turned ovo-lacto who now eats seafood and occasionally indulges in some non-kosher foods. It was a challenge at first. Especially in the advent of such sacrileges as tofu cheese and rubbery fake burgers. But we soldiered on, armed with tomes of cookbooks by the likes of Madhur Jaffrey and Martha Shulman. In fact, starting out I just had 2 cookbooks: "The World of the East" by MJ and "Best Vegetarian Recipess" by MS. And I really learnt how to cook then, living in semi isolation in a drafty apartment in Rhode Island making hiking pack expeditions to the nearest Whole Foods supermarket. G also bought me my very first recipe book, spiral bound, now falling apart but with its pages charmingly drawn in with cooking line illustrations. And if you look at the stained and creased pages, you can see how we evolved from internet recipes calling for prepackaged stuffs to making meals slowly and carefully from scratch. And best of all baking bread from scratch, using the cavernous 1970s oven left in our narrow kitchen where we learnt to cook with balletic grace without ever bumping into each other.

Then of course there were the long trips to Italy which really merit an entry all to themselves and then there was coming back to Singapore – which I really should save for later too, since this entry is just becoming too gargantuan…