I’m Stefanie, 23, and I was born and bred in Singapore – a country famous for its fervent food culture, so it’s only natural I grew up with a love for food and eating out.

Singapore is a place where you can buy a plate of delicious chicken rice right outside your door for $2. Because good food is so affordable and convenient there, I never really thought about the bigger issues behind what I was eating. Where had my chicken been sourced from? What were the different elements of the dish that made it go so well together? How long had the shop-owners been making that recipe, and what was the story behind it? On top of that, for most of my life, I’d barely even touched a stove or chopped any onions, and the extent of my cooking capabilities was scrambled eggs I’d learned off Youtube.

When I moved to Perth in 2010 for university, I began to experience food in a completely different way. I caught my first fish to have for dinner. I visited a fruit farm for the first time in my life – and was blown away by the taste of an apple plucked straight from a tree (instead of having spent days traveling thousands of miles in a refrigerated container). I encountered people who had an inspiring passion for the food they produced. Australia is a country that reveres home-cooking – and this is where I started to experiment more in the kitchen.

This is where I truly fell in love with food, and this is where I decided that it’s something that I want to spent the rest of my life involved with.

Right now, I work as a waitress at Gordon St Garage in Perth – a humbling yet incredibly rewarding job that’s worlds away from the white-collar ambitions that my parents and teachers had for me when I was student. Yet there’s nothing else I rather be doing – here I get to learn more about food and wine on a daily basis, and get to meet and share life with people with the same love. I dream about opening my own cafe in the future, and of traveling the world learning and experiencing all I can about food. I won’t claim to be an expert at anything, but I hope that by blogging and sharing these experiences with you, you’ll be inspired to learn and experience more too.

Let’s gather around the table, and let’s eat!

* See Origin Story post here
* All photographs are taken with an iPhone 4S and put through an Instagram filter unless otherwise stated.