About
The much anticipated origin story of South Island Kitchen
South Island Kitchen started out as a GitHub repository consisting of markdown files, with each one a recipe we'd found somewhere online and then rewritten into something more usable.
The git repo was born out of frustration with many recipes in both print and web format. For recipe websites, almost all of them are a mess to use. You scroll through paragraphs of backstory to find the recipe buried at the bottom, the method is written in chunky, hard-to-parse blocks, and the measurements jump between metric and imperial without any consistency.
Beyond the web formatting, recipes in all forms are just unrealistic, particularly around seasoning. The amount of salt, acid, or spice a recipe calls for is often nowhere near what any reasonable person would need to make the dish taste right.
Having our own versions meant we could fix that. We'd take a recipe, rewrite it into a format that was clear and well-structured, and then adjust it over time to reflect what worked. It also meant that when someone asked what we'd made for dinner, we could send them a link rather than try to explain it over text.
At some point we found out about Eleventy, a static site generator that renders markdown into web pages, and it made sense to migrate everything over to a proper website. That became southislandkitchen.uk — deployed via Cloudflare Pages, which means it loads quickly, works on any device, and is considerably less intimidating to send to a family member than a GitHub repository URL.
The philosophy hasn't changed. Simple, readable recipes – written to actually work and styled to stay out of the way, and easy to return to.