Where This All Started
My relationship with cooking started early — and awkwardly. Growing up, I was fascinated by the food my grandmother made: deeply flavoured, made entirely from scratch, and never once measured. When I tried to recreate her recipes as a teenager, I failed spectacularly. Nothing tasted right. I didn't understand why.
It wasn't until I started paying attention to the ingredients themselves — where they came from, how they tasted fresh versus aged, how heat and acid and salt changed them — that things began to click. The food my grandmother made didn't taste good because of a technique. It tasted good because she started with genuinely good ingredients, and she trusted them to do most of the work.
That realisation changed how I cook. And eventually, it became the founding principle of this blog.
Why I Started Freshly Ingredients
I launched Freshly Ingredients in 2020, partly out of boredom during a long stretch of working from home, and partly because I was genuinely frustrated with the recipe resources available online. The problem wasn't a shortage of recipes — it was a shortage of good ones.
Too many food blogs bury the actual recipe under paragraphs of personal anecdotes that no one asked for. Too many treat "fresh ingredients" as a marketing phrase rather than a real commitment. And too many publish recipes that simply don't work as written — where the timing is off, the quantities are vague, or the dish tastes nothing like the photograph suggests.
I wanted to build something different: a site where every recipe has genuinely been made, eaten, and refined before it's published. Where "fresh" means something. Where the instructions are written by someone who made the dish, not someone who assembled a list of steps from other sources.
That's still the goal, four-plus years in.
How I Develop and Test Recipes
Every recipe on Freshly Ingredients starts in my kitchen in Vancouver, usually on a weeknight when I'm thinking about what I actually want to eat. I'm not designing for a food magazine or trying to impress a test kitchen team. I'm cooking for myself, my partner, and occasionally the friends who make the mistake of coming over when I'm in the middle of a recipe testing session.
My testing process is straightforward but thorough. I make every recipe at least twice — usually three or four times for anything more complex — before I consider it ready to publish. The first time I'm establishing the basic proportions and technique. The second time I'm looking for failure points: what can go wrong if you're distracted, if your oven runs hot, if you accidentally grab the wrong spice jar. The third time I'm refining the instructions to make sure they communicate what actually matters at each step.
I pay particular attention to timing, because the single most common complaint I hear about recipes is that the stated times are unreliable. When I say something takes 20 minutes, it takes 20 minutes — in my actual kitchen, with a standard home oven, on an average weeknight when I have other things on my mind.
My Philosophy on Ingredients
Fresh ingredients aren't a luxury — they're a strategy. When you start with good raw materials, you need to do less to make them taste good. This doesn't mean everything has to be organic or sourced from specialty producers (though if you have access to those things, use them). It means: buy whole vegetables instead of pre-cut, use dried beans when you have the time, make your own sauces rather than opening a jar.
The difference shows up in the food. It really does. And once you start noticing it, cooking becomes more satisfying, not less.
That said, I'm not dogmatic about this. I keep tinned tomatoes in my pantry. I use shop-bought stock when I haven't made any. I reach for frozen shrimp more often than fresh, because I live in a city where truly fresh shrimp is expensive and inconsistent. The goal is to use the best ingredients you can, wherever you are, and to understand why ingredient quality matters so you can make good decisions.
On the Shrimp
If you've spent any time on this site, you'll have noticed: there are a lot of shrimp recipes. This is not a coincidence and it's not a content strategy — I genuinely love shrimp. It cooks fast, it takes on flavour beautifully, it works in cuisines from all over the world, and it's one of the few proteins that's equally good as a simple weeknight dinner and an impressive dinner party dish.
The shrimp recipes on this site range from classic (BBQ shrimp, honey walnut shrimp) to weeknight-practical (shrimp sausage pasta, hot honey shrimp) to a bit more elaborate (shrimp and steak hibachi, Cajun fried shrimp). Whatever your skill level or available time, there's a shrimp recipe here for you.
A Note on Vegetarian Cooking
A large portion of the recipes on this site are vegetarian — and several are fully vegan. This isn't because I'm vegetarian (I'm not), but because some of the most interesting cooking in the world happens without meat. Lentil soups, vegetarian curries, roasted vegetable dishes, bean-based stews — these are the weekday workhorses in my kitchen, and I think they deserve to be taken just as seriously as meat-based dishes.
The vegetarian recipes on this site are designed to be genuinely satisfying, not meat substitutes. I'm not trying to make tofu taste like chicken. I'm trying to make tofu taste like the best possible version of tofu. Same for every other ingredient.
Life Outside the Kitchen
When I'm not cooking, I'm usually outside — Vancouver makes it hard to stay indoors. I hike, I cycle, and I spend a disproportionate amount of time at farmers markets, which has done wonders for my vegetable cooking and my weekly grocery budget.
I also read a lot about food history and food science, which is a slightly unusual hobby but explains why you'll sometimes find a paragraph in a recipe about why a particular technique works the way it does. Understanding the why makes the how much easier to remember.
I'm not a trained chef. I have no professional culinary credentials. What I have is fifteen years of cooking seriously, a genuine love of good ingredients, and a commitment to testing every recipe until it's something I'd genuinely want to make again.
Let's Connect
I'd love to hear from you — whether you tried a recipe and want to share how it went, have a question about a substitution, or just want to say hello. You can reach me via the contact page. I read every message myself and do my best to reply within a couple of days.
You can also find Freshly Ingredients on Pinterest, where I save recipes I love alongside my own. Thank you for being here, and I hope you find something worth cooking tonight.
