I am Sneh, and I live in gorgeous Sydney in Australia, with my two boys Rivs (21) and Rish (17). I am a recipe developer, content creator, food/lifestyle photographer, stylist and cookbook author. Cook Republic is my creative playground. It is a place for my food musings, a stage for the photographs I love to shoot, where I weave words into stories that form the fabric of my life. It is where memories are made, one recipe at a time!

In my past life, I graduated from University as a Computer Engineer and later studied design. But I always fancied working with food. The seeds of Cook Republic were sown in 2003 when I started a personal recipe database called Gel's Kitchen. Blogging was an alien concept back then, and I was using Gel's Kitchen to record recipes that I cooked and liked. By 2005, I had started blogging and found it to be an amazing medium to share my culinary adventures. And just like tha,t Cook Republic was born.

Over the past few years, Cook Republic has won Best Australian Blog 2013, Best Lifestyle Blog 2013 (Australian Writers' Centre) and been chosen as TOP 5 VOICES OF AUSTRALIA in the Food & Well Being Category. After winning the prestigious Voice Of Australia Award in 2013 and a $30,000 new kitchen, we underwent an 8-month-long renovation to build a kitchen/studio of my dreams. I did a brief one-year stint as a food columnist for ELLE Australia magazine, where I developed recipes, styled and shot them every month. My first cookbook, called Tasty Express, was published by Random House Australia in April 2014. It was also translated into Dutch by Aerial Media Company in the Netherlands later that year. In 2015, I organised and conducted a series of 12 pop-up workshops for food photography and styling. The sell-out workshops were immensely popular with people attending from all around the world. It was an unforgettable experience. Most recently, I worked as Food Editor for Woolworths, Australia's largest supermarket chain.

I was born in India, a good few decades ago and grew up in bustling Mumbai (It was called Bombay back then). A fantastical place forever festooned with crowds, colours, flavours and culture. I grew up on some of the best street food the country has to offer. A childhood spent amongst fruit trees and spice markets spoils you for life. I was raised a vegetarian. In my early twenties, I started eating meat occasionally. In recent years, I have become a Pescatarian and enjoy my seafood, but my heart sings when I sit down to a plate of plant-based food.

Indian cooking is a huge part of me and my food philosophy. It is all about cooking, exploring and celebrating real food. Food that is unpretentious, fresh, plentiful and can be shared across a table with people you love. The food on Cook Republic doesn't limit itself to a set group or ethnicity; it is exciting and adventurous and packed with variety. It is very veg-forward, with plenty of protein in the form of chicken, beef, pork, lamb and seafood. We are blessed with not having any dietary restrictions in our home, so we like to enjoy everything sensibly and with simplicity. I have spent the last two decades creating and testing healthy, nutrient-rich recipes for myself and my family that I share on the blog regularly.  My journey of eating simply and mostly plant-based foods led me to lose 20 kilos over the years. When you blog for so long and food is a constant, you often lose the love for food, the taste and hunger for it. But then you rediscover the joys of simple food, and life is delicious again. This blog is a roller coaster of our everyday life and our love affair with honest, simple food.

Over almost fifteen years, we've had a pen full of gorgeous heritage chickens in our backyard chook house - Mango, Sushi, Ginger and Olive (RIP Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Toad, Gnocchi, Miso, Heather, Snowy, Storm, Snape, Baymax, Coco, Taro, Pepper). Over the past decade, we have planted a huge variety of fruit trees that have finally reached the fruiting in abundance stage. We have Meyer lemon, Tahitian lime, Finger lime, Cumquats, Blood Orange, Makrut lime, Black Mulberry, Mango, Olive, Bay and Curry Leaf.

Nowadays, I am creating recipes for clients and shooting cookbooks and apps. I work from my home kitchen studio and offer food photography and styling packages as well as social media engagement for food brands in Australia and all around the world. And at the heart of it all, I blog.

I hope you enjoy reading the blog as much I enjoy writing it. If you wish to work with me, please email me!

Cook Republic is a personal journey, a very intimate exercise in writing and experiencing the world around me. All opinions expressed on the blog are my own and are never influenced by an individual or a brand. I am constantly exploring and trying out new things. If I love something, it makes an appearance on the blog. If I don't, it doesn't. I respect that everyone works very hard to create and propagate a brand/product even though they might not be suited to my/or everyone's taste. In the event I choose to accept a product and write about it, it gets the proper credit it deserves.