About Mash and Mix

There are two people behind Mash and Mix: Sarah Zain, who leads the food writing and editing from the United States, and Karim, who manages the website from Morocco. We are Moroccan college friends whose work together grew out of the meals, recipe notebooks and conversations we shared long before this site.

This is where we bring together everyday meals and baking ideas: breakfast cookies, chicken dinners, salads, side dishes and desserts. Our collection is broad, but the people responsible for the content are easy to name. Here is our background and how the work is divided.

Sarah’s cooking began with family

Sarah’s aunt Khadija ran a small bakery in the medina in Marrakech. She is one of the people Sarah credits with teaching her to cook. What Sarah remembers is the way her aunt paid attention to the food itself, rather than relying only on written measurements or a timer.

Khadija listened to the crust of the bread to judge it. She also had sayings that made the kitchen feel unmistakably hers. One was, “Never stir clockwise if you’re angry. The food absorbs your mood.” Sarah still remembers that rule, and still finds herself stirring counterclockwise when she is upset.

It is a family memory, rather than a scientific explanation for how food behaves. But it captures something about learning to cook from a person: you remember their voice and their habits alongside the recipe.

Sarah’s grandmother left another kind of guide—a handwritten Arabic recipe notebook. By her final year of college, Sarah was working through those pages and trying to turn familiar family cooking into instructions she could follow for herself.

A friendship before a publishing project

We met in 2014 in a university library in Morocco. Karim was trying to repair a broken laptop; Sarah was working on a recipe from her grandmother’s notebook. Food and technology were already part of the conversation.

Sarah lived in a small student apartment, where study sessions often turned into cooking sessions. She made tagine on a cheap hot plate. Karim helped work out how to buy the ingredients on a student budget and took on the tasting.

Those meals were practical. We were students using the space, equipment and money we had. They also showed us that we worked well together: Sarah cared about the cooking, and Karim was interested in organizing the work around it.

After college, Sarah moved to the United States. Karim stayed in Morocco and began working in technology and digital strategy. We kept in touch through WhatsApp, Instagram and calls, although for a few years those conversations were less frequent.

The couscous dinner that made us start writing things down

About three years ago, Sarah made her grandmother’s couscous for a dinner party in the United States. It was a dish she had grown up with, so the dry, clumped grains were especially frustrating. Knowing a meal well did not stop it from going wrong.

She called Karim, and we spent two hours going through the preparation. Sarah traced the problem to the steaming technique. She adjusted it and cooked the dish again the following evening, this time reaching the result she remembered.

That experience gave her a reason to record more than a list of ingredients. She wanted to keep the steps and small corrections that are easy to leave out when a recipe feels familiar. They might be the details another cook needs most.

Writing brought its own difficulty. Sarah felt that the recipes she typed sounded flat, more like instruction manuals than the food and memories behind them. Karim had been managing websites for other people, and their conversations became a way to combine her cooking and stories with his technical and organizational work.

Sarah Zain — writer, editor and kitchen testing lead

Sarah is Moroccan and now lives in the United States. Her cooking connects the North African food she grew up eating with the ingredients she can find in American supermarkets.

At Mash and Mix, she is responsible for recipe development, kitchen testing, writing, editing and final editorial approval. She supplies the cooking context and personal memories in her articles. Questions about ingredients, methods and corrections belong with her.

Her role is also to make the instructions understandable. A reader cannot see what is happening in the writer’s kitchen. Quantities, the order of steps and descriptions of texture all need attention on the page.

Karim — founder, strategy and site administration

Karim runs the website from Morocco. He handles strategy, hosting, technical maintenance, publishing systems, presentation and partnerships. He manages those responsibilities across our portfolio of websites while Sarah leads the food content.

At home, Karim’s dependable Tuesday meal is harira made with tomatoes, lentils, chickpeas, ginger and turmeric. It is what he turns to when he is tired and wants something warm. Grilled fish with chermoula is another family favourite, one he makes at least once a week.

He also cooks for his family in Morocco and shares feedback with Sarah. The website responsibilities and editorial responsibilities remain clear: Sarah approves the article; Karim manages its technical preparation and publication.

A real example of Sarah working on a dish

Sarah’s chicken tagine with preserved lemon took four attempts to reach the sauce she wanted. She was looking for a consistency that was neither too thick nor too thin, with the right balance of tanginess.

The first three attempts were fine, but she kept working on it. On the fourth, she was happy with the result, and her husband told her she had outdone herself. That is a particular memory from her home cooking, rather than a claim that every recipe on this site has had the same number of tests.

It also shows why specific observations matter. Saying that a sauce should taste good gives little guidance. Explaining its consistency gives the person making it something to check.

From a recipe to a published page

Sarah leads the recipe work and the editorial review. She checks ingredient quantities, the sequence of instructions, timing and the descriptions of what a cook should look for. She checks that the ingredient list and method agree and reviews the wording before giving final approval.

Kitchen testing and editorial review are separate activities. Reading instructions and checking measurements does not establish that the dish has been cooked. We do not treat a food image as evidence of a cooking test.

Karim prepares the approved article for the website and handles the publishing systems. Reader questions about a recipe go to Sarah; technical problems and partnership enquiries go to Karim.

Our use of AI and food imagery

We use AI to assist with grammar, spelling, readability and formatting. Sarah provides the food writing, cooking context and personal experiences, reviews the assisted wording and remains responsible for the final article.

Our image workflow includes AI-assisted enhancement and some AI-generated food illustrations. These visuals should not be understood as photographs documenting a particular cooking test. They do not establish who cooked a dish or how many times it was tested.

AI assistance does not carry out physical kitchen testing or replace Sarah’s final approval. The human responsibilities described here remain with Sarah and Karim.

— Sarah Zain & Karim