About The Sidesmith
At The Sidesmith, Sides Matter.
We’re Amy, Phenie and Sammy, here to make every salad and side dish the one everyone remembers.
Over the past six years, we’ve created hundreds of salad and side dish recipes, building one of the world’s most dedicated collections. Here, you’ll find everything from homemade dressings and creative side ideas to ingredient pairings and clever tips for choosing the perfect sides.
What We Stand For
We create recipes that are:
- Tested and true – Every dish we share has been made, tasted and loved in our kitchens (often more than once).
- Vegetable-centric – We celebrate seasonal produce and believe good food should be fresh, flavourful, and affordable for everyday cooking.
- Accessible yet inspiring – You don’t need to be an avid cook to make something delicious. Our goal is to make cooking sides easy-to-follow, creative and rewarding.
Trusted Collaborations
We’re proud to have collaborated with brands that share our love for heroing ingredients, creative cooking and the joy of entertaining, including:
Nutrition Australia, Meredith Dairy, Cargo Crew, Made In Japan, All Aussie Farmers, Yarra Valley Cheese, Butler’s Market Garden, Okabayashi Yuzu and SSS Foods.
Through these partnerships, we’ve created recipes, photography, and campaigns that highlight what we love most – great ingredients, easy-to-follow cooking and the creativity that brings them together.
Why People Trust The Sidesmith
Our readers, from everyday cooks to food lovers, come to us because they know:
- Every recipe has been tested and photographed by us.
- Our ingredient pairings and flavour ideas come from real kitchen experience.
- We share the why behind our recipes – not just the how.
A Little Bit About Us
We’re three friends with a shared love for salads and sides.
Amy brings creativity and a great instinct for flavour balance.
Phenie tells the stories behind the food, making our ideas easy to connect with.
Sammy creates flavour-packed recipes that are simple enough for everyday cooking, yet impressive enough to share.
We believe great sides bring everything – and everyone – together.
Let’s Connect
Whether you’re searching for your next side or a brand looking to collaborate, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]
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Meet The Sidesmith Team
Hey! I’m Amy! I’m not quite sure how it happened but along the way, I was dubbed “The Salad Queen”. At parties when I have to bring a plate, my family and friends have stopped giving me the choice of contributing anything else but a salad or two.
Nothing gives me more joy when a side or salad gets the praises it so deserves and I secretly do love it when it outshines the main course.
I was born in Malaysia, a country where the culinary culture is somewhat obsessive in nature. Malaysians will drive miles in peak hour traffic just to get a bowl of noodles from an old school sidewalk hawker stall.
My mother loved to entertain and as a child, I always looked forward to opening our house for Chinese New Year. I have no doubt that dinner party gene was passed down to me.
The hungers in my life span beyond food into travel. It is another great passion of mine and it expands my culinary repertoire. Constantly inspiring and a marriage made in heaven. Oh… and let’s not forget my insatiable appetite for an exemplary Pinot Noir. Food. Travel. Wine. Need I say more?
Salads play a big part on our family dinner table. The salads I make are made with love and care, sprinkled with my daughter’s enthusiasm to help along the way. The Sidesmith is my creative outlet as we build the biggest salad website for all to enjoy!
Hi there! I am Sammy, the home cook, recipe creator and good food enthusiast. Growing up Vietnamese-Chinese in Australia, and my love for travel over the years, have shaped my cooking into a melting pot of Asian and Western influences. I love balancing contrasting flavours and am constantly inspired by the wonderful multicultural food scene around me.
Like Amy, salads have always been my thing. Friends call me the “salad queen” because I never turn up with a boring one. I love creating sides and salads that make people go back for more. Dishes that are full of flavour and often just as good as the main affair.
I have been cooking full meals since my teens, often recreating my favourite meals from restaurants and local eats I’ve visited. I love challenging myself in the kitchen, turning leftovers into something new and experimenting with creative ingredient pairings. The Sidesmith is my way of sharing these recipes, real food I cook for my family every day, tested and loved in my home kitchen.
I love creating simple, flavour-packed recipes, often influenced by my Asian upbringing, that are easy enough for everyday meals or elevated for entertaining. My goal is to inspire home cooks to be creative with their sides and salads – even for everyday meals. Don’t be afraid to add your own twist.
Heya! I’m Phenie, and The Sidesmith is my marketing playground.
I’m the one behind the MacBook – dreaming up ideas to get our salad recipes seen by the world, scheduling social posts, and painstakingly editing videos until they’re “social-ready.”
I get to bring my background in social media marketing into a space I love — food — which makes it all fun and exciting… until Mr Zuckerberg decides to change the algorithm again.
Oh, and let’s not forget, I’m also the official test-kitchen taster for Amy and Sammy. Tough gig, I know.
As a Melbourne-born Chinese (ABC), my childhood revolved around traditional Cantonese food, TVB dramas (a Hong Kong TV channel), and weekends at Chinese school with other kids who were just as unwilling as I was. My dad owned a few Chinese restaurants, but it was my mum who truly taught me how to cook.
In my late twenties, after six years working in Singapore, I realised I needed to learn every dish I loved growing up — before they were lost forever. Mum patiently taught me each one, and that’s where my love for food really began.
Now that the kids are grown, I’ve found more time to play – on the netball court, in my home gym, out on a bush trail, or in the kitchen testing new recipes. I still host plenty of dinners and catch-ups, because life’s best moments happen over good food, great company, and an occasional pour of wine.
So yes, this (ad)venture is perfect for me. I love sharing recipes that bring people together and hanging out with you on social.
And they say you can’t make friends with salad… PFFT.
We proved them wrong.
How The Sidesmith Came to Be
Do you ever sit back sometimes and think about how the decisions you have made or how the paths you have chosen all end up in this very moment in your life?
We do!
Every time we look back at how The Sidesmith was created, we shake our heads in wonder. This salad and sides recipe website came to fruition when the stars aligned and put all of us work from home mums, who were searching for their next business venture, together.
So how do we know each other?
Phenie and Sammy are family by marriage. Their husbands are cousins who can’t go past a week without a good whisky session.
Phenie and Amy are long time friends united by travel wanderlust and smashingly good food.
Phenie introduced Amy and Sammy and through our coincidental love for salads, entertaining, digital marketing, and the desire to create an online business so we could continue to work from home, The Sidesmith was born.
The evolution of the website took on a life of its own. Not only did we share our interests for salads and sides and the online world, we were so in tuned with our brand, business, and marketing vision.
This has continued since inception and we love everything about this journey. Well, it does help when we have prop shopping days, “research” lunches and emergency meetings because we found a fabulous bottle of wine.
Do enjoy making our recipes and reading our food stories. We hope you’ll enjoy our salad recipe website as much as we do!
Amy, Sammy and Phenie
xx
P.S. We love a good collab and believe that magic happens when visions align. If you would like to Work with Us, we would love to hear from you!
