I have a passion for cooking, I LOVE to cook and I love trying new recipes.
Growing up as a teenager I was already cooking from my dad’s cookbooks this was pre-internet times and my dad had an extremely large collection of cookbooks to choose from. So, at 14 I was already cooking complicated dishes such as soufflé without having them collapse which my dad was super proud of.
Later I married a chef, who was a really good cook and had worked at 5-star restaurants. My next boyfriend after my first marriage ended after thirteen years together was a Macrobiotic chef. I was raised Macrobiotic by my mom, so this was nostalgic childhood food. It started out as cooking lessons, but then we quickly became an item. Learning to cook Macrobiotic as an adult actually inspired me to write my first book which was a cookbook with Macrobiotic recipes.
After we broke up I wanted to make vegan pâtisserie, which was hardly available at that time – we are talking 20 years ago. I made the most amazing vegan cakes like a vegan cheesecake with red fruit topping and then I would put a real rose in the middle of the cake in a sterilized tube of water. That’s how I met husband number two, who is Senegalese. He helped me prepare for catering events and after a year we fell in love and I was knocked up.
That man can cook, we divorced but he still cooks for us from time to time and I am a sucker for Cebbu ech (fish with rice) which is the white variant of Cebbu Jën one of the most famous dishes in Senegal. My all-time favorite though is Supa Kanja, it’s my ex-husband’s favorite too. It’s okra (ladyfingers) soup with shrimp in palm oil and served with white rice. Soooooo good! it beats sushi and I love sushi too.
But now the honest truth is that due to many different reasons such as building an online empire, traveling the world for two years, and my mother living with me I stopped cooking. It’s only really since we have settled into our new home here over the past two years that I have started cooking again. I made the viral TikTok feta pasta, as well as strawberry kisses that I found a recipe from on Instagram, and I had a phase in which I was obsessed with rice paper spring rolls.
I recently switched doctors and because I have gained 14kg since I moved here, which despite my love for food has not been because of food or eating too much I have now switched to keto which is not always easy for me because I was raised vegetarian and I am just not used to eating huge amounts of animal protein. I love my tofu, tempeh, and seitan as well but vegan or solo veg doesn’t completely work for me either. So, I am really trying to find what works for me and what is the best for my body.
I love carbs as well, but because I tend to get hypoglycemic at times I know from experience that decreasing carbs is actually good for me. It’s just breakfast that I find really challenging because even though I like eggs from time to time I don’t like it enough to eat it every day and neither does my liver. So far I am switching it up with chia pudding, skyr yogurt and I want to try almond flour pancakes because they are supposed to taste like parathas.
Although I had a whole Ayurvedic cooking phase prior to my Macrobiotic phase, I learned to eat parathas in India and quite honestly it was the only thing I could eat that they did not screw up with chili oil, chili flakes, or other excessive heat. Did you know that Indian Domino’s throw chili flakes on your pizza? I like spicey, I use siracha, sambal manis, wasabi, and so on, but pizza is pizza and you should not screw it up with chili flakes. I am sorry.
In the end, parathas with curd and mixed pickle saved my life on the road traveling through India because it at least did not burn my esophagus in the way that other for Desis made food burned it.
Anyway, because we normally make a clear fish soup with salmon and codfish and because it is the Year of the Water Tiger which calls for doing things differently, I decided to mix things up. I found a keto seafood chowder recipe online and made it tonight for dinner and it was bussin!
The picture above is what it looked like and the taste was simply heaven.
With my deepest love,