The Feel Good Foodie Cookbook

The Feel Good Foodie Cookbook

Introduction

I saw my mom cook for a family of six growing up—it looked hard and tiring. There was so much to learn and so many things to accidentally burn! Even though I loved to eat and was deeply curious about food as a child, I figured I was safer out of my mom’s way, helping set the table and do the dishes. Then I went from having zero kitchen skills to cooking for millions of followers online. But it didn’t happen overnight.

My family is originally from Lebanon and, until I was eleven years old, I grew up in a predominantly Lebanese community in the small West African country of Sierra Leone. I can’t remember a single restaurant in the tiny town we lived in, and there were only a couple of small grocery stores. I didn’t grow up ordering pizzas or eating ready-to-heat enchiladas. My mom prepared virtually every meal from scratch with Mediterranean ingredients seven days a week. It wasn’t trendy. It was just what we ate.

Walking into our bright, blue-tiled kitchen in Sierra Leone always felt like entering a mom-and-pop café—it was small, cozy, and always smelled like there was something good cooking. I can time travel to that kitchen so easily in my mind because, in retrospect, I think I was learning to cook from the earliest days of childhood—I just began learning through listening and observing. There were the clang of pots and pans, the thunk of Mom chopping fresh vegetables, and the hiss of onions meeting hot fat. Unforgettable aromas sifted through that space, like cardamom blooming in melted butter or garlic and cilantro sizzling in the hot, overworked skillet. I remember how my mom’s fingers delicately and confidently stuffed small squashes with fragrant rice and ground beef, and how she would whisper a quiet prayer every time she transferred something hot, like just-made yogurt, into a big bowl. Most of the time, our meals weren’t complicated. Maybe dinner would be Lemony Grilled Chicken Kabobs (page 205) marinated in olive oil, lemon, and garlic and then grilled outside over smoking charcoal—we ate that with Tabbouleh Salad (page 102), which was mounded with fresh herbs that perfumed the whole kitchen when they were minced. Or maybe we’d enjoy warm bowls of Crushed Lentil Soup (page 148), which could spend an entire day simmering on the back burner. My mom’s meals didn’t just feed our bodies and souls. They made us feel good.

When I turned eleven, in 1993, my parents made the difficult decision to leave Sierra Leone due to the political climate. We moved to the United States to live in Dearborn, Michigan— the largest Lebanese community outside of Lebanon—where my father had many relatives. And the grocery stores in the American Midwest? Wow! The shelves looked quite a bit different from those in my little town back home in Africa! Shopping for food with my mom, I could feel the fireworks going off in her brain: Oh my gosh, I can buy Tuna Helper and have dinner on the table in seven minutes! But instead of zeroing in on packaged foods over scratchmade foods or vice versa, my mom figured out how to use convenience foods to create shortcuts for her more traditional Mediterranean recipes.

A can of tomato paste, for instance, could save hours of simmering down fresh tomatoes but still deliver the same rich flavor in stews. Buying a ready-made tub of yogurt—which is used for so many condiments, sauces, and marinades in Mediterranean recipes—would save the labor-intensive process of heating fresh milk, transferring it from one pot to the other, and checking it throughout the day until it reached the desired consistency. Mom embraced frozen vegetables, store-bought vegetable broth, and canned chickpeas. She also cleverly figured out how to use some of her favorite Mediterranean ingredients to enhance the American dishes we liked in the Midwest, adding cumin- and cinnamon-flecked seven spice to marinara sauce and hamburger patties or stirring toasty, nutty tahini into Sesame Banana Bread (page 48). With these thoughtfully chosen, time-saving tweaks, her usual repertoire of homemade meals suddenly took about as much time as a box of Rice-A-Roni—all while maintaining her delicious and satisfying results. And though my mom’s kitchen in Michigan was thousands of miles from the one we had left in Africa, I was still hit daily by the comforting, familiar fragrances of childhood, like garlic, sumac, parsley, rose water, and lemons.

I bet you’re thinking this is the part where I tell you I quickly became a cooking pro, that all those hours listening and observing as my mom made her Mediterranean masterpieces meant I could finally pick up a knife and let loose. Nope! At times, my mom would put me to work arranging fruits on platters for guests or squeezing more lemon juice into her fresh batch of hummus. That was pretty much it. (We did eventually realize that as a rather ambitious, detail-oriented person, I was well suited to take on the delicate task of rolling stuffed grape leaves.) Truth be told, I didn’t really start cooking until I got married.

In my first year of marriage, I was working full-time at a corporate job, my husband was busy with medical school, and I found myself with almost no hands-on cooking knowledge in my wheelhouse. Why learn to cook when I could be spoiled by my mother, who was a great cook? (In those early days of marriage, I would drive by my mom’s house on my way home from work and pick up dinner—seriously, it was like my very own personal take-out service!) Eventually, I was determined to give my growing family the comfort of home-cooked Mediterranean meals that my mom gave us growing up. So, one phone call at a time, I asked her to teach me my favorite dishes, starting with the most basic recipe I could think of: Vermicelli Rice (page 224).

With that first dish in my repertoire, I slowly started gathering the tools to learn more. I turned to the Internet, both to absorb as much information as possible and to start building a two-way conversation with a virtual network of cooks and food lovers. I documented my progress on Instagram under the name Feel Good Foodie and, in the meantime, accidentally inspired strangers—millions of strangers from all over the world—to cook, too. We created a community of cooks and eaters that included tired parents, aspirational home cooks, enthusiastic grocery shoppers, and feel-good ingredient seekers, all with good appetites. This community of new and seasoned cooks alike saw my recipe fails, tweaks, and triumphs. Most importantly, cooks everywhere saw themselves in me.