A favorite destination from her new book:
One chapter that I’m proud of is the Egypt chapter. The recipes were all developed by Ham El-Waylly, who’s an Egyptian-Bolivian recipe developer, and he hit it out the park with his hummus and his ful medames. In that chapter opener, I talk about going to the Cairo Museum, noticing that all of these Egyptian antiquities weren’t in Cairo, and being told by the tour guide like, “Oh, those are all in the British Museum.” I’m really proud that I wasn’t afraid to bring those things up and have those conversations about imperialism. I think that we often whitewash history for kids’ sake and I just didn’t want to do that. One of the copy editors for the book sent me a note: “I never thought I’d see mentions of colonization in a kids’ cookbook.”
Her method for creating an itinerary:
This is from decades of over-planning—I choose one activity per day and then center the day around that activity, and plan very little else, because otherwise you feel like you’re on a schedule and your vacation suddenly becomes not a vacation anymore. It’s one thing a day—a big lunch reservation, a big dinner reservation, a museum, a play—and then you can be chill or more leisurely. Everything else gets to fill around that and be spontaneous.
How she figures out where to eat when traveling:
As a food writer, you feel like every trip is work in a way: If I’m going to be eating at restaurants, I might as well eat at the best restaurants. The first line of defense for me is locals. The people who are physically there are the best people to give recommendations, and the people who visit there a lot. I’m going to Italy this summer and my friend Allie goes with her family every year—she sketched out an itinerary and shared all of her Google maps. If you have a friend that you trust, you don’t need five bajillion people’s recommendations. I do a lot of Google Maps sharing, and write a little note like, “This is my friend Kayla’s recommendation,” “This is Cece’s recommendation.” I’m a strong believer that there is such a thing as too much research, too much information.
It’s a combination of picking your “must gos,” like the places that come up a lot on lists from people that you trust, and then the places of convenience that are just good to know. I always try to map out good coffee shops, good bakeries, quick lunch spots, bars that I can go to if I want to have another drink after dinner. Those are nice things to have to make you feel like you’re a local.
The destination she could go to a million times and not tire of it:
New Delhi. My family lives there; I grew up going there. I feel a real sense of peace when I land in Delhi, when I smell the Delhi air. It just feels like home, even though I didn’t grow up in India at all—my mom did. Every single time I go to Delhi I see something different. I feel that way about the whole country in general, but especially Delhi.
