When her peers are mulling over places to check out for dinner, primary school teacher Yeo Szemin heads straight home after work to cook for her family.

The 31-year-old says: "My colleagues tease me, calling me an auntie, as I always drop by the supermarket to buy groceries. I don't go out often. It's just school, supermarket and home."

She also heads to her grandparents' home to cook once a week.

Ms Yeo says that cooking brings the family together, adding that it also breaks the monotony of buying takeaway meals from hawker centres.

She specialises in homey Chinese cooking, from soups to stir-fries. Her favourite recipes include chicken, mushroom and wolfberry soup, salted vegetable and duck soup, baked beans with pork slices and steamed fish in light soya sauce.

Her love for cooking stems from her childhood days.

She says: "Unlike most of my friends, I went to my grandparents' home for dinner after school and watched my grandmother make bak zhang (meat dumpling)."

So inspired is she by her grandmother's cooking that she documents the recipes, including wontons, and squid rings with dark soya sauce and chillies, on her blog as a way of preserving her family's heritage.

Not surprisingly, she cooks up a storm during Chinese New Year. For the past seven years, she has been cooking for her family's open house. Up to 50 people visit her grandparents' home in Thomson Hills estate on the second day.

She fries 2kg of bee hoon with canned pig's trotters and makes platters of ngoh hiang and Nonya chap chye (vegetable stew).

"Being the only one from my generation who can cook, I feel honoured to take over some of the kitchen duties and my relatives always look forward to my fried bee hoon," she says.

These dishes complement her 82-year-old grandmother's classic dishes, such as braised oysters with black moss, fish maw soup and curry chicken.

Besides cooking, Ms Yeo, who is single, also bakes on a large scale.

An enormous vintage floral enamel platter filled with a mountain of pineapple tarts on the dining table is hard to miss during the interview. Calling it "serious business", she says her family bakes up to 1,000 tarts a week before Chinese New Year and distributes them to relatives and friends.

Three years ago, she added salted egg yolk cookies to her festive bakes "way before salted egg yolks became trendy".

Having fried pork ribs and chicken with the brined yolks, she wanted to know how they would taste in cookies.

"Salted egg has a savoury taste that makes you want to keep eating it," she says. "But I use just two salted egg yolks as they contain high levels of cholesterol."

She learnt how to make salted egg yolk cookies from an online recipe, which she tweaked, adding icing sugar and corn flour to get a melt-in-the-mouth texture. Instead of sesame seeds, she garnishes the cookies with flaxseeds.

While it appears to be a simple recipe, she says that handling the sticky dough, which is made with little flour, can be tricky.

Besides refrigerating the dough for 30 minutes, she also presses metal cutters into the rolled-out dough and drags them out to the side to remove the cut-out cookies.

Ms Yeo's two younger brothers aged 24 and 21, help to roll the dough or pineapple filling and bake some batches of tarts.

Her father, 60, is a regional sales manager and her mother, 58, is an airline ticketing clerk.

She says: "You know Chinese New Year has arrived when the house is filled with the aroma of baked goods."