Releasing my inner domestic goddess – discovering the joy of homemade food

Cooking at home can be time-consuming, but it is also strangely satisfying.

- Chua Mui Hoong

In my 20s and 30s, busy building a career as a journalist, I used to tell my friends quite cheerfully: "I studied hard so I don't have to do housework.

That sentiment didn't endear me to friends who had given up their careers to be stay-at-home mums, managing the household.

I knew enough about running a household by then to know it's just as challenging as holding down a job. But I knew what I preferred – the clarity and independence of professional work to the messiness, unending and unpaid routine of raising children, cleaning and cooking.

Fast forward 30 years and I'm now in my mid-50s. I gave up full-time work two years ago, and now live in Perth, Australia, as a retired ex-journalist. People ask how I spend my time. The truth is, my days fly past speedily and generally happily, full of purpose and variety.

One new activity taking up time these days is cooking, and I am discovering to my delight that I enjoy mucking about in the kitchen.

I enjoy eating food, but have seldom expended energy to make it.

I grew up in a family of hawkers. From the time I could walk, I was helping out at the hawker stall, collecting plates, plucking towgay (bean sprouts) and shucking cockles. From the time I was about 14, old enough to manage the gas burner and big enough to wield the long wok turner, I learnt how to cook char kway teow the way I liked it - with lots of wok hei, a tiny bit of chilli and an egg well-splattered over the noodles.

But at home, I never helped in the kitchen, because my mother believed that our job as children was to focus on our studies. Her thinking must have rubbed off on me. In secondary school, I shunned the subject home economics and chose technical studies instead, where we did woodwork, metalwork and learnt the basics of technical drawing.

And so I sailed through much of my life enjoying food without ever learning how to prepare it. Until I moved to Australia.