Was cooking something that was important to you then? Did you always dream of starting something like Basbaas?

I didn’t start out wanting to make food professionally. It felt like a childhood chore. I’m the eldest daughter of 10 children, so my role was to always be an extension of my mom. I boiled a ton of water, I made rice, I made pasta, I made a lot of tea.



But when I started visiting my family in Oslo, Norway in 2008, I always fell into serving my siblings and my mom — teaching them new recipes, or teaching them how to make American food. It felt natural. Cooking felt like an aid in terms of finding my identity. I was the girl next door in America, and then this Somali eldest daughter, former refugee immigrant — all these different layers. And I kept coming back to the same questions: How do we tell these stories from our perspective, and how do we take away these narratives that have been built on our behalf?



So one summer, I took my Vitamix with me and I started blending all these sauces for my family, and this was really where Basbaas came from.

Source: Thekitchn.com

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