A BIT ABOUT ME

My relationship with food has always been incredibly important to me, and I’m from a hotch-potch multicultural family full of foodies and self-confessed master chefs. At its heart, my family food culture comes from East Africa, where my parents and grandparents are from. We have a mixed heritage combining Gujarat, Tanzania and Zanzibar. My grandma (Nanima) is from Zanzibar and she has definitely set the tone with our family food culture being the primary feast maker, and intuitive master chef. My mum cooks mainly Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food, but also does a mean roast dinner. She’s part Anglicised, part Ottolenghi generation. Add to that the Italian/Iranian and West Country boys that married into the family, I grew eating everything from Barazi (pigeon pea and coconut curry, one of my all time Nanima favourites), to lasagne from Abruzzo to Tahdig. And don’t forget my mum’s roasts. Who can ever forget their mum’s roasts!

This, combined with growing up in London and a thirst for food-centric travel offered me inspiration and influence, as well as access to and diversity of ingredients. I talk to my Nani about cooking and almost nothing else. I asked the owner in a small restaurant in the Costa Rican rainforest to teach me how to make Gallo Pinto. I cooked a rehearsal dinner for 50 in upstate New York based on email conversations and the help of my inebriated friends. These are the experiences that have made me the chef that I am, and why cooking intuitively is so important to me. I’m not a Zanzibari chef, unless you count the taught by doing, intuitively adapted versions of my Nani’s recipes which I absolutely love to cook regularly. I may be classically trained in French cooking, and draw on those skills and teachings a lot, but that’s not the chef that I am either. I am all of these things combined into something that is bound by my strong intuitive connection to and love of food.

And so, quite understandably, I always dreamed of being a chef as a child. But I ended up following a more ‘traditional’ path, feeling the compulsion towards security and career path over vocation. So there I was, working a corporate job straight out of university, and whilst my childhood dreams were on the back-burner (I love puns, so I won’t excuse it!) I still loved food, spent lots of my free time in the kitchen or eating out, and found cooking, eating and sharing food a major source of joy and peace, and a wonderful antidote to my stressful, hectic, grinding work life.

I finally decided to follow my passion and studied at Leith’s School of Food and Wine in 2011. Since then I’ve been on an amazing journey, working in all sorts of kitchens, from contract catering to restaurants and bakery production, and even my own! The career change also brought with it a huge personal journey, as I yearned for more meaning and purpose in life. All this experience has brought me to where I am now. At a time where diet culture, information overwhelm and self-care scams all conspire to confuse and control us, I’m hoping to spread a bit of magic instead of fear around our relationship with food. I’m all about incredible, intuitive, mindful cooking, and making every aspect of buying, cooking and eating food a part of a conscious life and a way to access simple joy and mindfulness in a hectic and demanding world. And most importantly, food that’s made with love eats with love.

I believe that by really connecting to our intuition and the world around us, we can all have a joyful and conscious relationship with food. By honouring our mind, body and soul we are empowered to make appropriate food choices, and to overcome subconscious behaviour, externally driven beliefs, fears and judgement. By approaching food from this perspective, we remove the need to restrict or control as well as the need for excess and we feel more connected to ourselves, our community and our environment, making positive choices for all three. It sounds like magic, I know! :)

I now focus my work on the areas of food and cooking that resonate most with my philosophy: as a private & retreat chef, teacher and workshop leader, hosting and cooking on retreats, holidays and events around the UK and beyond, running mindful baking and intuitive cooking workshops, teaching intuitive cooking and working one-to-one with clients to help them reconnect to the joy of food and cooking. Get in touch to find out more!