A lifetime doesn't fit in a Notes app

This is a note I wrote to myself four years ago. I was frantically typing ingredients and steps into my phone while my mom moved in a flurry, tossing aromatics into oil, narrating in Chinese I could half follow. COVID had sent me home from college. Eating Chinese food out every day wasn't realistic, and I figured: now's as good a time as any to learn.

What I found was that cooking is hard. You need the right ingredients, the right tools, the right timing. What sounds like five steps is actually a million. My Chinese is basically kindergarten-level and I can read maybe 10% of what my mom sends me. Learning from her directly was next to impossible.

It didn't help that I'd spent most of my life trying not to learn this. Growing up, I took her food for granted. I was an Asian kid with immigrant parents in a town that was 99% white. I remember opening my lunch and pulling out a tea egg (茶葉蛋), marbled brown from steeping in soy sauce and tea. The kid next to me reacted immediately with "that smells horrible". I never brought food from home again.

It wasn't until eighth grade when I moved to Taiwan that I saw, for the first time, everyone around me proudly eating the food my mom made. Tea eggs were in every 7-Eleven. The food I'd hidden at lunch was the food an entire country was built on. I came home with a completely different mindset.

So when COVID sent me back years later and I watched my mom cook for hours, I saw it differently. She'd braise tripe for three full days. I'd take a batch home in portions, freeze them, and a single batch would last me a month. I can still smell it. Taiwanese restaurants are rare where I live, so not being able to cook her food meant not really being able to eat it either. Her food is home, and without being able to make it, home felt out of reach.

There's exactly one dish of hers I can reliably make. Canto steamed chicken. Chicken legs in a bowl, ginger, red dates, steam for thirty minutes. Green onion and peppers on top at the end, then pour hot oil over to release the aromatics. Three steps, the right pan, five walkthroughs to make it stick. It's the only one I can cook without calling her.

Then there's cold-dressed tripe (涼拌牛百葉), the recipe at the top of this page. Five steps. Blanch the tripe, peppers in oil, mix, done. Hers is delicious. Somehow mine tastes ten times less flavorful with a questionable texture. To this day I don't know what I do wrong. The instructions themselves are right, they just aren't enough. A lifetime of cooking doesn't fit in a Notes app.

So we built Whisq. It takes whatever my mom sends — a YouTube link, a TikTok, a blog, a photo of her handwriting — and turns it into a recipe I can actually make. Structured steps, ingredients split out per step, and the video is still there when I need to see the visual aid.

It won't make me as good as her. Nothing will. But the next time she sends me a recipe, I'll get further than the note at the top of this page.

It's on the App Store. Built for anyone whose best recipes are in a language they don't fully speak.