I honestly can’t tell you how exciting it feels to finally have this out in the world because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for such a long time. I love social media and I’m so grateful for the community I’ve built there, but there are some things that just need more than 30 seconds or a minute. Mauritian food is definitely one of them. There are recipes where the story is just as important as the method, ingredients that need explaining, equipment that might look completely normal to somebody Mauritian but completely unfamiliar to somebody else, and all those little things you pick up from watching your mum, aunties and grandparents cook that never really get written down anywhere.

That was really the starting point for this series. I wanted somewhere I could actually cook properly, explain what I’m doing, talk about where the food comes from and share some of the stories and memories that sit behind it. I wanted it to feel like you were actually coming into my kitchen rather than just watching a recipe fly past on your phone.

Mauritian food is the food that shaped me and ultimately it’s the food that completely changed my life. When I won MasterChef back in 2012, so much of what I cooked was rooted in the flavours I grew up eating. Mango, Chilli, tamarind, coriander, garlic, ginger, curry leaves, pickles, chutneys, street food and big pots of food bubbling away on the stove. It’s food that is generous, colourful and absolutely full of flavour, and even after all these years of cooking professionally, writing books, travelling and eating in some incredible places, I always seem to come back to Mauritius.

I’ve realised recently just how much of that food culture I still want to document, and I don’t just mean recipes. I want to talk about the things you find in a Mauritian kitchen, the snacks we all grew up eating, the jars of chilli and pickle sitting in the fridge, the breakfasts made from yesterday’s leftovers and all those little habits and traditions that make the food what it is. There is so much more to Mauritian cooking than simply following a recipe and I really want this series to capture some of that.

Episode 1: What You’ll Find in a Mauritian Kitchen

I actually decided that the first episode shouldn’t involve any cooking at all. Instead, I’m starting right at the beginning with the essential equipment you’ll find in a Mauritian kitchen, including some of the traditional tools I grew up around and still use today. Before we start making dal puri, chutneys, pickles and gato pima together, I thought it would be nice to show you some of the equipment behind them and explain exactly how it’s used.

Some of it will probably look very familiar and some of it definitely won’t. There are things in my kitchen that I’ve used for years without really thinking twice about them, but the minute I started filming this episode I realised how specific they actually are to Mauritian cooking and how much history sits behind something as simple as a kitchen tool. You can watch the first episode now on my YouTube channel:

Shelina’s Mauritian Kitchen on YouTube

And if you enjoy it, please do subscribe. It sounds like such a tiny thing but subscribing, commenting and sharing really does make a difference when you’re trying to build something new and I would love to have you there from the beginning.

What’s Coming Next

There is so much coming and I’m genuinely so excited about it. This isn’t going to be a series where everything is overly polished or complicated. I want it to feel like you’ve come into my kitchen and we’re just cooking together. Some episodes will be proper recipes, some will be tasting things, some will be showing you ingredients, and sometimes we’ll end up making three things because apparently one chutney is never enough in a Mauritian household.

We’ve got chutneys, pickles, gato pima (mauritian chilli cakes), breakfasts, rougaille (a delicious spicy tomato sauce), butterbean curry and of course dal puri coming up. There will be things made on a roche cari (the Mauritian pestle and mortar), plenty of chilli, lots of little shortcuts and hopefully loads of useful tips along the way. What I really want is to explain the why behind the food and not just tell you what ingredients to put in a bowl.

I’d love for this to eventually become a proper library of Mauritian cooking, somewhere you can come back to when you actually want to learn how to make something properly. I’d love people with Mauritian heritage to be able to send these videos to their children or friends and say, “this is what I mean when I talk about the food I grew up with”, but I’d also love it to introduce Mauritian food to people who have never experienced it before.

Mauritius is a tiny island in Africa but the food culture is absolutely incredible because it has so many influences running through it. Indian, Chinese, African and French sit alongside each other and somehow it all feels completely Mauritian. I genuinely think there is so much more for people to discover and I would love to play a small part in sharing that.

There is obviously something slightly terrifying about putting something new out into the world too. You can work on something quietly for months and while it’s still private it feels completely safe, then suddenly you press publish and everybody can see it. So yes, I may have refreshed YouTube an embarrassing number of times already, but mostly I’m just really excited that it’s finally out there!

I’d really love for you to come along with me as the series grows, so tell me what you want to see. If you’re Mauritian, tell me which dishes instantly take you back to your childhood and which recipes you think absolutely have to make it into the series. If you’re new to Mauritian food, tell me what you’re curious about or what you’ve always wanted to try.

I’ve wanted to do something like this for such a long time and it feels really special to finally be able to bring it to life.

Shelina’s Mauritian Kitchen is officially open.

Come and join me.

Watch and subscribe on YouTube

There is a lot of cooking to come and I cannot wait.

Shelina x

18 June!

I started this Substack because I wanted somewhere a little quieter. Somewhere I could write properly about food, heritage, travel, business, family and all the things that don’t always fit neatly into a social media post.

And then life got very, very full.

Be…

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The other half is learning how to talk about it without feeling like you’re constantly selling. And honestly, I still find that difficult.

When I wrote my first cookbooks over a decade ago, the publishing world felt very different. Social media existed, of course, but not in the way it does now. People still bought cookbooks almost automatically if they …

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I recently had the joy of being part of BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet at Theatre Peckham alongside Jay Rayner, Jeremy Pang, Melissa Thompson and Lerato Umah-Shaylor.

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The part no one tells you about publishing a cookbook. What I didn’t expect when I started writing cookbooks was how quickly it would stop being entirely mine.

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I thought writing recipes would be the hard part

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Knightsbridge, I’m coming to cook for you.

On Wednesday 18 March I’ll be at Divertimenti for a live cookery demonstration celebrating the launch of my 3rd cookbook What to Cook When Everyone’s Hungry!

I’ll …

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I first ate something like this in Chiang Mai. A bowl of coconut curry noodle soup inspired by Khao Soi. Rich, fragrant, layered with spice and comfort. It felt generous. Slow. Memorable. And then real life resumed.

School runs. Work. Emails. Deadlines. After school moods. That 5pm moment where everyone suddenly realises they’re starving and you’re expected to produce something nourishing, fast and preferably joyful.

I didn’t write What to Cook When Everyone’s Hungry to create complicated food. I wrote it because I wanted cooking to feel good again. Fast. Full of flavour. A little bit exciting. But also realistic.

As a single mum, there isn’t a hidden clean up crew. If I use six pans, I’m washing six pans. So the food has to earn its place.

This Thai coconut curry noodle soup is exactly that kind of meal. Deep flavour. Quick rhythm. Comfort in a bowl. The sort of dinner that resets an evening instead of derailing it.

The video I’m sharing this week shows that rhythm. The way I cook at home. The way I build flavour quickly. The way dinner actually happens here.

Because the truth is, most of us don’t need more “perfect” recipes.
We need reliable ones and we need food that works when everyone’s hungry.

That’s why this book exists.

And if you’ve ever stood in your kitchen at 5pm wondering what on earth to cook, you already understand the title! My book is out on the 12th March and you can pre order it here

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I’ve just come back from Ghana, and it felt like the right moment to sit down and begin. Not because everything is perfectly formed, but because travel has a way of loosening things. It slows you down. It reminds you why you do what you do in the first place.

Being Mauritian means living as a true melting pot. A melting pot not just in theory, but in dai…

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