London-based Indonesian-Australian Lara Lee is a food writer, chef and co-founder of Kiwi and Roo.

Her first cookbook, ‘Coconut & Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen’ was named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2020 by The New York Times, Eater and The Guardian.

But becoming a chef wasn’t an option for her in the beginning, and here she shares bits and pieces about herself and describes her journey into collating 85 recipes into a single cookbook dedicated to her roots.

It runs in the family

“My passion for food was born from a very early age because my grandmother who was from Timor, Indonesia, was not only an incredible cook, but also a baker,” said Lara.

“She owned a bakery to support her family because she was widowed at a young age.”

Lara then explained that after her dad migrated to Australia and married her Australian mother, her late grandmother also moved to live with them and they would have feasts of Indonesian food.

Food was the number one passion

Lara studied media and journalism – as she did want to be a writer in some capacity – but accidentally fell into technology sales for the next 10 years.

“I was good at it, but I spent all of my waking hours outside of work doing the other thing that I loved – food. I was cooking dinner parties for friends and family,” she said.

Retracing the roots

Since Lara moved to London about ten years ago, she started to learn her late grandmother’s recipes from her aunties and mother.

Then, she started selling antipodean sandwiches alongside her friend at the local food market and would be up until 2am in the mornings and back at it at 6am.

“When I realised that people wanted to pay for my food, I had the courage to quit my job,” Lara confessed.

A cookbook competition set everything in motion

Lara went to Leith’s cooking school for an intensive 9-month course, where she spent a few months being stagier in a few Michelin-starred restaurants around London.

Lara said that it was “a dream come true”, and this was when she discovered a cookbook competition called the ‘Yan Kit So Award’.

“That was the very first time I put pen to paper in terms of what ‘Coconut & Sambal’ might be. When I started writing the proposal, a growing passion to reconnect with my Indonesian heritage ignited and I wanted to get to know my grandmother through her food.

“Quite wonderfully, I came runner up in that competition and that gave me the confidence to keep going.”

This experience also put Lara in touch with some incredible chef writers such as Fushchia Dunlop, Sri Owen and Helen Goh.

“The next thing I know, I got a book deal with a publisher and started on this journey!”

The cookbook that took two years

Lara then spent the following two years intensely writing, researching and testing recipes for the cookbook.

“There’s never going to be a point where you feel like the cookbook is perfect. I came back with 300 recipes and picking just 85 is a really difficult task.

“There are going to be days where you write five words. Then you sleep on it and wake the next day with a fresh pair of eyes. It’s just the most amazing thing because suddenly, you’ve written 1000 words,” she admitted.

Lara offered an analogy – just as how you should never rush cooking a curry, you simply can’t rush writing a cookbook.

The best moments behind the scenes

Lara shared two of the loveliest moments that happened while travelling in Indonesia during the cookbook research.

“A taxi driver, Pak Budi in Padang, West Sumatra, took us to his home in the outskirts of Padang to meet his family,” recalled Lara.

For two days in a row, Lara cooked his traditional Minangkabau family’s recipes alongside his mum and aunties in this little house that he’d built.

“We would sit on the floor, using simple tools (not a knife in sight) to create these dishes. I felt like I was being invited in on someone’s secret; being taught things that no one on the outside had ever heard of before.

“This shows you that you don’t need fancy equipment to cook good Indonesian food, what you need are passion and good produce.”

Lara’s parents had also come along for the trip for six weeks, and they spent a lot of time with her aunties – learning and cooking recipes together.

“Seeing my family come together and cook my grandmother’s recipe 17 years after her passing away was like a celebration of their lives.

“So, that was kind of the other really special part of writing this cookbook. I don’t think that all of us have gotten together like this since my grandmother’s funeral.

At its core, Lara described ‘Coconut & Sambal’ as a celebration of her grandmother and of Indonesia itself.

“My dad and my aunties told me that my grandmother would be so proud of me and that, to me, is just the most precious thing.”

This article first appeared on Set the Tables.

Set the Tables is positioned to inspire and educate those already in the industry as much as the aspiring reader who dreams of a future in the food business, and maybe even the merely curious tantalised by the vast and irresistible universe of food and drink.