Sarah’s Kitchen Travels
A culinary nomad’s journey
Hello and welcome to Sarah’s Kitchen Travels
From childhood comfort food to cooking on open fires in the Himalayas food has been my passport to explore a world full of wonder. Bustling street markets in Kathmandu to small fishing villages in Guernsey each destination inspires my creations, infusing my dishes with the rich stories and traditions of diverse cultures. I hope you enjoy this site as much as I enjoy researching it.
Destinations
Destinations
This will be places I’ve visited and have photographed well enough to share.
Recipes
Recipes
A varied collection of recipes I like, and some I love. I’m still building there’s more on the way
Insights
Insights
Things I’ve learned along the way, often quite painfully.
About me
My first venture into the kitchen was when I was 3, it was a cold snowy day and involved a frozen rat, the cat and one of my mother’s favourite cooking pans. I had intended to cook a meal for the cat but once I was discovered the kitchen became a war zone, angry mother, terrified 3 year old and demented cat trying to find a way out. I avoided the kitchen as much as possible after that.
Several years later I summoned the courage and stepped back into a kitchen, lack of money during school holidays was the incentive. I had a string of holiday jobs in restaurants around Guernsey. Eventually holiday jobs became permanent jobs and I unintentionally fell into cooking via dishwashing. In one of my unplanned career moves I started working on a fishing boat running small nets, crab pots, and oyster farming. I loved that job until I couldn’t face another winter of freezing cracked hands and smelling of fish. So in the mid 1980s I packed a holdall with a few clothes and went off to London without a clue what would come next.
I saw an advert for an oysterman and chef at Bentley’s in Mayfair. I knew about oysters and I could cook but I wasn’t a chef. I’m still not sure how I managed to blag my way into getting the job but there I was rubbing shoulders with celebrities, gangsters, and the colourful characters of Soho. I learned a lot working in a fine dining kitchen, mainly that the toxic high testosterone world of chasing Michelin stars wasn’t for me. After 2 years I escaped, swapping my chefs whites for trekking boots and an open fire in the foothills of the Himalayas. That was where I really learned to cook, on an open fire, without gadgets.
When I was in Nepal I met and married Sera and I’ve been making him suffer ever since. After more than a decade of running expeditions in Nepal and selling Nepalese clothes at music festivals Sera and I decided to settle in the UK. In 2003 we sold everything we had (apart from the children) to buy our first restaurant. We opened Yak Yeti Yak in 2004 and 21 years later we’re still here. Travelling, meeting people, collecting stories and recipes is still my happy place, Nepal still teaches me something new every day.