Sharing food passion
My Blue Tea brews happily in a community of people passionate about food and cooking and we are always looking for like-minded people to share our love for healthy, delicious food with. Our kettle is always on the stove, ready for a boil for a welcoming pot of tea as we meet fellow chefs to share our beautiful superfoods with.
Introducing Nonna Chong
Recently, we have had the delight to collaborate with Nonna Chong, a true-blue foodie who lives and breathes a passion for not just healthy, homey and authentic cuisine but also in teaching others to create these very same dishes. Making her dishes from scratch is something that Nonna stands by - she is a pure, rock-solid old-school chef, having inherited her culinary skills from her father who could recreate dishes just by taste.
Just as a perfumist knows every single scent that goes into a blend, Nonna's father possessed a talent for sniffing out and tasting the ingredients that have gone into each dish. His deep love for cooking did not just stop with him. Nonna has inherited his gift and she is not keeping it to herself. If anything, she is bent on sharing her knowledge, experience and joy for cooking with the world! Making dishes from scratch allows Nonna to get to know every single ingredient and spice out there, as well as their characteristics and how to give each dish its own unique, unmistakable identity.
For Nonna, each dish is like an old friend. She knows the dish inside out (literally)!
Nonna has lived in Australia, Vietnam, Singapore and all the way on the other side of the globe in Peru. Chefs are always hungry for new flavours and culinary experiments and Nonna has made the most of her international experience to learn to recreate different dishes with her powerful tastebuds that can recognise a variety of flavours.
Being a chef is more often a passion than a job. This means their brains whiz non-stop 24/7 analysing ingredients and styles and improvisations. Nonna never stops living, breathing and dreaming about cooking whichever country she is in.
A Common Tongue
For Nonna, food is a wonderful unifying element. It brings people together from all cultures, backgrounds and nationalities.
Food is actually quietly powerful in how it can break down differences and invisible walls and help people to simply connect from the very core of their being.
We are fortunate when we can enjoy good food with and appreciate the presence of those around us, even with complete strangers.
Chefs who have had the opportunity to spend time in another country can attest to this - you do not need to speak the other person's language to connect if you have a wonderful dish to share!
The joy of food and cooking is so powerful it helps two people understand each other even if they do not share a common language. Basically, cooking itself has its own universal language!
A chef from any country uses a knife or a saucepan just like another chef from across the globe. Whatever the nationality, when one smells good food, everyone can appreciate the joy food brings to their bodies. Watching how another chef put together raw ingredients into a piping hot dish that is drool-worthy is how one learns.
Nonna has been inspired by many other budding chefs on her travels and Nonna is paying it forward by sharing with many others.
Having collaborated with several other chefs, My Blue Tea is convinced chefs are one of the most generous species of humans on the planet!
They are all so eager to create and share their knowledge and experience! We have yet to meet a chef who hoards their skills and dishes!
Bringing Back Home Cooking
Nonna was particularly spurred on to share her love for cooking when she noticed a worrying trend. Families and young people are eating out more and more. Cooking at home seems to be slowly dying out. For anyone who loves to tinkle in the kitchen and experiment with ingredients, this can feel like a looming catastrophe. And Nonna was having none of that.
All chefs are excellent at improvising and problem-solving, and Nonna decided she had to do her part to keep the fiery passion for home cooking going.
That is why Nonna decided to bring her cooking skills to online cooking classes so anyone from anywhere in the world can jump in and learn how to make beautiful dishes to share with families and friends. Nonna is never without a smile in the kitchen and she has been inspiring people from all over to love cooking. Cooking is not something to be intimidated by and instead of seeing cooking as a chore, it is actually a joy, a fun experiment, a creative outlet and also wonderfully therapeutic!
When she is not catering for parties or events, you will find her online, Zooming her way through the globe, giving online cooking classes where she is literally cooking across borders. Participants receive a list of ingredients they need to prepare for the class as well as the recipe and on the day itself, Nonna dons her apron and gets into cyberspace, ready to take her participants through making anything from dumplings to curries to street food, all from the comfort of everyone´s own kitchen!
True-Blue Collaboration
Nonna is always on the lookout for high-quality ingredients to use in her dishes, and My Blue Tea was so excited when she reached out to us! We are collaborating with Nonna for her online cooking classes to provide organic and natural plant-based Superfood Powders as ingredients for her cooking classes.
My Blue Tea's Superfood Powders are available online and participants can order them ahead of time or buy them directly from the closest location that stocks My Blue Tea's products.
Nonna teaches the participants in her online cooking classes how to use our ingredients and we are really excited to hear about how her participants are using our ingredients and perhaps have even gone on to experiment on their own to create their own dishes. We are thrilled by the idea that so many all over the world can learn about our Superfood Powders and use them to make beautiful inspirations.
My Blue Tea continues to expand and we are talking to various partners worldwide to help make our Superfood Powders available in various countries.
Put on Your Aprons
Nonna Chong will be taking participants step-by-step to make many beautiful dishes such as Kueh Ketayap (with Pandan), Laksa, Pad Thai and the wonderful thing is these are family friendly cooking classes.
You can get online with your children, with a group of friends, or have a Cook-Off with your favourite aunts and uncles, and it is a wonderful way to spend a few hours connecting over food and to have a delicious reward waiting at the end for you, all lovingly taught by Nonna and made with your own hands! Definitely, something to be proud of at the end of each cooking class!
Nonna hopes to spread the joy of cooking to many around the world and keep the tradition of cooking very much alive in our modern times. Many things can go digital, but food is still something that is very real, that can be touched and tasted and nourishes both body and soul.
For Nonna Chong's cooking participants, register here for Nonna´s online cooking classes and use this code NonnaSuperFoods to enjoy 20% discount on all Superfood Powders for your first time purchase.
Just Keep Cooking!