Share and Give Through Cooking
Back in my high school days, I was always sad to see my friends with homemade meals made by their moms. I didn’t have a chance to feel the warmth and love those meals gave them because I lost my mother when I was a kid.
It all started when I gave birth to my beautiful girl 20 years ago. When I saw her for the first time, I promised myself that I would provide her with my own homemade food, showered with endless love.
I started to take cooking lessons (with many personal trials and errors) to provide my family members with special homemade dishes. At first, I was happy, but I soon started to get tired of my daily chores as I was a professional IT worker with very busy working days. Waking up early and not sleeping until midnight was exhausting and I started to feed my girls with frozen and unhealthy food. I was concerned about that and determined not to give up. With self-research and taking cooking lessons in my spare time, I finally found the best solution to provide my family with healthy but simple food… Meal Prep. With this style, the dishes that I made lasted for 3 days to 1 week in the fridge. It was a bit tricky to preserve the meals but I was happy and satisfied that I’d finally learned something new and simple to occupy my family's needs at home, at school, and at work.
I decided to quit my job and focus on my 12 and 8-year-old daughters (now 20 and 16!). Some of my friends asked me about the dishes that I made and told me they missed my delicious food. Because of that, I brought them homemade creations for their lunches for free. I didn’t have any experience in selling food and starting a simple culinary business at home, even though my colleagues insisted I start my own business. Instead, I opened my first cooking class for my colleagues because my passion is teaching and sharing simple and valuable lessons with others.
My cooking class grew perfectly. It was surreal but exciting to have opportunities to teach people besides my colleagues, from other working moms to some homeless people. I was really happy and grateful for that opportunity. One of the best things that happened was when somebody on Cookpad reached out and asked me to be one of Masak Bareng’s mentors. Masak Bareng is a community of Cookpad authors sharing extra knowledge on cooking and baking for beginners. I wasn’t that confident at first because I didn’t have a professional background in cooking, but when I met Kristina it all changed and I gained the confidence to teach and share things with others. I started to teach some lessons and write my first recipe on Cookpad, now I have over 500 recipes on my account. Being a mentor for others is my true passion and seeing other people grow is my true happiness. I created a community called Bakuliner, where people could come together to sell simple dishes. I was so happy that some of my recipes were used by community members to help them to start their own small businesses. I realized that my small actions were making a big impact on others. They could make supplemental income from my recipes and I didn’t charge them. I gave it all for free because that is one of my purposes in life, to share and give.
I finally joined Yeah! Meshi, thank you Soetrisno for making this happen! Being a part of Yeah! Meshi is one of the best opportunities in my life because I can continue my passion to share and have a big impact on others through cooking. I can help homecooks earn supplemental income through their homemade dishes and share some of my experiences in cooking so they can scale up and be better cooks for their family and others. I hope, with Yeah! Meshi running and growing, that together we can improve our homecooks and we can make children in Indonesia happier because of our healthy, homemade dishes that are made with love.
