About All Ways Delicious
Welcome to All Ways Delicious, where I share recipes for some of the best dishes from around the world, the kind with big, bold flavors that use authentic techniques and ingredients whenever possible.
I’m Robin Donovan, and my goal here is simple: to help you cook delicious dishes from all over the world and actually get them right, not just get them done.
How I Got Here
I grew up eating my way through the incredibly diverse food scene of the 1970s and ’80s Bay Area. My mom was an adventurous, excellent cook, and between her kitchen and the restaurants we tried around the Bay Area, I grew up eating Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian, and plenty else besides. Mexican and Latin American food, too, was baked into California life. And of course, there was California cuisine, which was literally born in my home town of Berkeley.
By my twenties I was throwing dinner parties in my tiny San Francisco apartment (I didn’t even have room for a proper dining table, so guests usually sat on the floor). Each one explored food from a different part of the world: from-scratch chili crisp, handmade dumplings, and three kinds of bao made for a dim sum feast, or homemade samosas, chutneys, roti, and curries for an Indian one, and so much more.
Eventually I realized that all I wanted to do was cook, eat, and talk about food, so in 2001, I began writing food stories for major publications. A few years later, I landed my first cookbook deal, which eventually turned into 40+ published cookbooks. Along the way, I started my first food blog, which I rebranded as All Ways Delicious in 2017. That first blog grew to three, and food blogging became my primary business focus.
You can read more about me here!
What You’ll Find on All Ways Delicious
If you, like me, are always on the lookout for new foods and flavors from around the world, I want to help you bring them home to your own kitchen. Every recipe on All Ways Delicious is:
- Developed, written, and photographed by humans. That usually means me, though I do occasionally hire some of these tasks out to talented, experienced, professional recipe developers and food photographers (always real people)
- Fully tested, as many times as it takes to get right (I never use AI in developing, testing, or creating images of recipes)
- True to where the dish actually comes from, not a “dumbed down” version that trades flavor and authentic techniques or ingredients for simplicity or speed
- Written to teach you something every time, a technique, an ingredient worth getting to know, or a bit of where the dish actually comes from, so you walk away knowing more than you did before
- Built to work in a regular American kitchen, with real guidance on where to find an ingredient and which version to buy
- Mostly rooted in Asian and Latin American flavors, because those are the foods I was exposed to most growing up on the West Coast. But you’ll also find dishes handed down to me by my Jewish grandmother and Czech father in law; some classic, and some not-so-classic holiday dishes; air fryer and Instant Pot recipes for snacks, mains, and desserts, because we all need shortcuts now and then; and even some “American” favorites
Fair warning: I’ll never talk you out of making a special trip to an international grocery store for fresh curry leaves, the specific Mexican dried chiles your regular supermarket doesn’t carry, like cascabel or pasilla, the right kind of rice noodles, or palm sugar imported from Thailand. That trip is always worth it.
And don’t worry. If you don’t have easy access to all the specialty markets I do, I’ve got you covered: I’ll point you toward where to order ingredients online, or what you can substitute from your regular grocery store.
My hope is that All Ways Delicious becomes one of the handful of food sites you trust, and one you turn to whenever you want to try something new.
You can find me on Pinterest, Flipboard, LinkedIn, MuckRack, and Instagram.
