Mouths begin to water at the sight and smell of fluffy aromatic ghee rice, spicy sambal chicken, fish masala and raita.

After a little sprinkle of her mother’s homemade masala powder into the cooling raita, the 33-year-old changes into her favourite T-shirt – one that says ‘I’m made of chai, briyani and kindness’.

Haseena Mohamed Ali, or Sheena Haikal, is the host of Sheena’s Cooking Passion on Facebook.

Known for her quick and easy pictorial and video tutorials on Indian cuisine, her recipe videos garnered up to a million views during the Movement Control Order (MCO) as keen followers tried out every single recipe at home.

But Sheena confesses that she is certainly not the Nigella Lawson of Indian cuisine.

Speaking to FMT, she says she was not much of a cook to begin with, preferring instead to be a spectator as her parents cooked.

According to Sheena, her parents are excellent cooks and her dad is well known for his biryani recipe.

“The love for cooking eventually caught up with me when I was waiting for my SPM results. With so much free time, I would call up my mum for recipes and start recreating them,” she says.

In 2015, Sheena gave birth to a baby boy and spent her days in confinement cooking and posting pictures of her dishes on a popular Facebook cooking group called ‘Masak Apa Hari Ini’.

People in the group were clearly impressed with her food and flooded her with requests for her recipes. In fact, her butter chicken recipe was so popular that it was shared 132,000 times.

Sheena’s friends eventually persuaded her to start her own cooking page and in April 2016, Sheena’s Cooking Passion was born.

“I started the page as a hobby. But then, I would get hundreds of messages from people with zero experience in cooking, who would tell me that they had given my recipes a try and it turned out well. That motivated me to share more recipes,” Sheena tells FMT.

These days Sheena juggles handling a busy Facebook page and regularly posting recipes with her full-time job at the University of Leeds.

“I have been with the University of Leeds for eight years now; it’s practically my second home. Fortunately, I have a very supportive and flexible boss who understands my passion. In fact, she was the one who encouraged me to pursue it,” says Sheena.

As for the recipes, Sheena explains that most of them are her mother’s, but she made an effort to learn Malay recipes by wading through stacks of cookbooks when she was still a cooking novice.

“My mother is my quality control officer. With just a quick whiff of my cooking, she can tell which ingredient is missing from my dish.”

So far, Sheena has three published cookbooks under her belt. Two of them, ‘Sheena’s Kitchen Diary’ containing 70 recipes and ‘Sheena’s 30 Most Favourite Recipes, Deepavali edition’ were published last year.

A second Deepavali edition cookbook was released just recently, and that too has been a huge hit.

“Cooking is easy, it is just the mindset many have that cooking Indian food is difficult. If you refer to my recipes, you’ll see I use all the same ingredients. It’s just a matter of how you play around with them.

“If the dish is meat-based, you’ll need cinnamon, clove and cardamom. If the dish is seafood-based, you’ll need fenugreek.”

According to Sheena, there are three things she can’t live without. These are kitchen paper towels, coriander leaf and her mother’s spice blend of fennel, coriander seeds, cumin and black pepper.

This home cook swears by her mother’s mix, explaining that it is all one needs to whip up a lip-smacking pot of rasam, mutton curry, chicken curry, raita and even dalcha.

Besides her day job and passion for cooking, Sheena also has other plans and aspirations, which she shares with FMT.

“I would like to have my own cooking show. I know that through patience, hard work and passion, it will come true one day.

“I was also supposed to host cooking classes once a week, but Covid-19 put a stop to my plans. I am hoping to pursue it next year,” she says.

Feeling inspired to try out a couple of Indian recipes such as fried fish biryani or chicken sambal? Check out Sheena’s Cooking Passion on her Facebook page here for the full recipe and rundown.

In the meantime, have a happy, safe and blessed Deepavali.