About Simply Yummy Bites

We’re Sarah Zain and Karim, two friends from Morocco who now work together across two continents. Sarah lives in the United States and leads the food content; Karim is based in Morocco and manages the website. Our story begins with student meals and recipes written by hand.

Food Sarah grew up learning

Sarah’s aunt Khadija ran a small bakery in the medina in Marrakech and was one of the people who taught her to cook. She did not depend on a timer to judge the bread. Sarah remembers her listening to its crust: a whisper meant it needed more time; a crack meant it had gone too far.

Khadija also had a saying about stirring when upset: never stir clockwise when you are angry, because the food absorbs your mood. Sarah still remembers it and sometimes stirs counterclockwise when she feels upset. It is a family memory, not a scientific rule, but it is part of how Sarah remembers learning in her aunt’s kitchen.

Her grandmother’s handwritten Arabic recipe notebook was another connection to family cooking. By college Sarah was working through the notes and translating them into steps she could follow. Those lessons made her attentive to the details a cook notices, such as a sauce’s texture or the sound and appearance of bread.

A friendship built over student meals

Karim and Sarah met in a university library in Morocco in 2014, during their final year of college. Karim was trying to fix a broken laptop; Sarah was working on a recipe from her grandmother’s notebook.

Study sessions at Sarah’s small apartment often became meals cooked on a cheap hot plate. She would make tagine, while Karim helped figure out how to buy the ingredients on a student budget and took on the tasting. She brought the cooking and flavour; he enjoyed organizing the practical side.

After college Sarah moved to the United States. Karim stayed in Morocco and began working in technology and digital strategy. We stayed in touch through messages, calls and Instagram, even when day-to-day life made the conversations less frequent.

The meal that made Sarah want to write things down

About three years ago Sarah prepared her grandmother’s couscous for a dinner party in the United States. The couscous came out dry and clumped together. She was frustrated because it was a dish she had grown up eating and thought she knew well.

She called Karim, and we spent two hours talking through the preparation. Sarah traced the issue to the steaming technique, changed her approach and made the dish again the following evening. This time it came out as she remembered.

That experience made her want to document the decisions a familiar recipe can leave unstated. The first versions she typed felt flat, though, and she wanted her food writing to carry some of the stories as well as the method. Karim had spent years managing websites for other people, so we combined Sarah’s cooking and writing with his technical work.

Meet Sarah Zain

Sarah is Moroccan and lives in the United States. She is the writer, editor and kitchen testing lead at Simply Yummy Bites. Her cooking draws on North African home food and the ingredients available in her American kitchen.

She develops recipe content, writes and edits articles, handles food-related corrections and gives final editorial approval. Her responsibility is to explain the work clearly: ingredient quantities should match the method, and the instructions should tell a reader what they need to do next.

What a testing process can look like

One example from Sarah’s own kitchen is chicken tagine with preserved lemon. She made it four times while trying to get the sauce neither too thick nor too thin and the lemon tang where she wanted it.

The first three attempts were fine, but she kept adjusting the dish. After the fourth, her husband told her she had outdone herself. This is a specific example from her cooking, not a statement that every recipe on this website has been tested four times.

Testing and editorial review are separate activities. Reading a method and checking its measurements does not establish that the dish was cooked, and a food illustration is not a record of a kitchen test.

Meet Karim

Karim is our founder and strategic manager. From Morocco, he manages hosting, site maintenance, presentation, publishing systems and partnerships across our websites. Sarah makes the final editorial decisions for the food content; Karim prepares the approved work for publication.

At home he often makes harira with tomatoes, lentils, chickpeas, ginger and turmeric—his dependable Tuesday meal when he wants something warm. Grilled fish with chermoula is another family favourite that he makes at least once a week. He also cooks for his family and shares feedback with Sarah.

How an article reaches the site

Sarah leads recipe development, kitchen testing, writing and editing. During editorial review she checks quantities, ingredient lists, the order of steps, timing and descriptions of what the food should look or feel like. Sarah approves the final article; Karim manages its technical preparation and publication.

Simply Yummy Bites includes recipes for meals, sides, baking and desserts. We want readers to be able to tell us when a measurement is unclear or a step needs a better explanation, so Sarah can review a specific issue.

How we use AI

We use AI to assist with grammar, spelling, readability and formatting. Sarah supplies the food writing, cooking context and personal memories, reviews the assisted wording and remains responsible for editorial approval.

Our visual workflow includes AI-assisted image enhancement and some AI-generated food illustrations. These images should not be treated as photographs documenting a particular cooking test. AI does not physically test recipes or approve publication.

— Sarah Zain & Karim