Okay, it's time for you to taste.
I was always really, really excited about food.
I think it needs a little bit more oil.
I would sit and watch my mom cook growing up.
I would read the few cookbooks that we had cover to cover.
That's funny, it doesn't even tell you..
I remember there was like a restaurant listings
website that I would just read religiously
even if we had no intention of visiting these restaurants.
I think it needs a little more salt.
You want to taste it?
My mom basically did everything
to promote and like nurture my interest in food.
I don't think she knew how far it would end up going.
But cooking together was like a real early point
of connection and one that we've sort of had our whole lives.
My name is Priya Krishna, I'm a food reporter for the New York Times
and the author of the cookbooks Indian-ish and Cooking At Home.
For centuries of food writing, we have focused
on white chefs cooking primarily European food.
And I really try to center and normalize
perspectives that are non white, non Euro
maybe sometimes even non restaurant.
I think that's an important counterbalance to
you know, the years and years of writing on
French fine dining restaurants in coastal cities.
It all started when our family friends gifted me
this Pretend Soup cookbook.
So what year?
Somewhere in the 94-95 timeframe
because if you look it says preschool.
But I didn't start using it until I was like after preschool.
Yes, yeah.
I was coming from a household where we were
predominantly eating Indian food.
So this book, which is a pretty
like white American sampling of food
all of these dishes felt really strange and exotic to me.
This one I remember I read this popover recipe so many times.
Did we ever make it?
No we never made it.
There was one recipe it was called Green Spaghetti.
I had eaten spaghetti but it had only ever been tomato sauce.
So the notion of spaghetti that was green, just like
blew my little mind.
It's like a cheese pasta.
It was really this idea that like a recipe
was part of a cookbook and a cookbook was like a mini world
that you could explore and that food could really
open you up to worlds you never knew existed prior.
For some reason, that particular book in that
particular recipe felt world opening to me.
Wait, are we using this one?
No, I'm going to do
half of it.
But we have this much pesto.
It'll be enough for this.
Trust me.
So how did we zero in on making the green spaghetti?
I think realistically, it was probably your call.
I'm sure there were a lot of things I wanted to make.
Yeah.
And you were like, I don't really want to make a soup with orange juice and bananas.
That's probably true.
My interest in food- a lmost immediately after coming to America,
I found all these TV programs,
PBS programs where I was watching Ming Tsai
and Yan can cook and Julia Child
and I just enjoyed watching and then experimenting.
Once the kids came and Priya was always
more demanding than Mira ever was, that was in a way a nice challenge.
I wish I had more time.
But given the time constraint I did the best I could.
Does it need salt, pepper?
It's great.
Yeah?
It's really great.
Good. You want a spoon?
You know, early on it was her
teaching me and now it sort of seems like
this very fun exchange of ideas.
But it's very much also, you know
now that I've been around some of the
best food writers and recipe developers
and restaurants and I've been so lucky.
I really have a deeper appreciation for
how good my mom is at at what she does.
Pesto Pasta and a bean salad.
Wait till we go outside.
For me, my family is everything.
They are like, you know, the reason I get up in the morning.
And how we have long shared and connected with one another is through food.
I think that you would single handedly expanding the awareness of chaunk.
Oh my god. It definitely was not single handed dad.
For like most of my high school experience, I really sort of
turned away I'm from Indian food.
But I will say when I was starting out in my career
it was really wonderful to like reconnect with my food
and my heritage and start to cook Indian food again
and start to talk to my mom and my dad about like
Okay, why do we make this dish?
You know, where did you learn to make this?
One day I'll be able to like, tell my kids like our
family history through the lens of what we ate.
And that's really cool.