LOW Bee Yinn started her blog Rasa Malaysia (www.rasamalaysia.com) in July 2006 as an experiment to document her family’s homemade recipes.

Penang-born Low feels that Malaysian cuisine is under-rated and wants to change that perception via Rasa Malaysia.

Residing in Irvine, California in the United States, the Penang-born and raised 30-something mainly wanted to record the bits and pieces of home cooking she learned in her younger days, as well as fix her craving for Malaysian food, especially Penang hawker food. She was also driven by the urge to make Malaysian cuisine known to the world.

“I learned cooking from my late grandmother (who was a Nyonya), my late mother (who just passed away recently), and my aunt. I’d learned bits and pieces of home cooking (Chinese, Nyonya) while growing up, observing them in the kitchen and always helped out. But I learned a lot more when I started cooking on my own when I came to the US in 1995. I would always call home to ask my family how to make a certain dish,” Low shared with Tech&U.

On top of that, she felt compelled to educate the world about Malaysian cuisine.

“I personally think that Malaysian cuisine is ‘under-rated’ in the Western world and I wanted to change that perception via Rasa Malaysia,” she said.

With easy-to-follow recipes, drool-inducing food photography, easy-to-digest posts, and eating chronicles posted on her blog, Low now has over 200,000 page views per month from readers all over the world.

“The response has been more than I have hoped for. I didn’t expect it to be so popular (I get many fan mails on a daily basis) but I am very happy that it did. I was also featured by major Press – both online and offline. I am sure both my late grandmother and my mother are very proud of it – I am making their home-cooked dishes known outside of our family,” she enthused.

Based on the amount of publicity and e-mails she gets, Low feels that her readers are now more well-informed and “intrigued” and, hence, more “interested” in Malaysian cuisines through the recipes she shares, and the food photography she captures. Financially, too, Low is making some extra pocket money from the advertising on her site.

“Most importantly, it fulfils my desire to keep my family’s recipes ‘alive’. Every dish also has a story behind it and reminds me of the sweet and nostalgic childhood memories,” she said.

“I would like to grow the readership even more. One million page views a month would be nice, which means that more people will learn about Malaysian food. But it might take a long time to get there, or may never get there,” Low said.

“Ultimately, I want to have a cookbook, where I can share more about Malaysian cuisine. I love watching cooking/food-related shows, so that would be very nice, too. But the latter might well be a dream and may not come through,” she concluded.