Rediscovering Nigeria By Becoming American «

 Dan Pashman: This episode contains explicit language.

Yewande Komolafe: I think I’m at the part of my life where I’m just reflecting on all of the experiences that I’ve had. I call it — a few years ago turned 40, and I call it my shameless 40s where I’m just like living without shame because I’m figuring out that a lot of the shame that I carried was put on me by, like, culture, family, experiences, and it’s not mine to carry and so I am, like, shedding that chain.

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies it’s for eaters, I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. Quick note before we get started, this Wednesday October 25th is World Pasta Day. And to celebrate, I am going to be making a big major announcement. I’ll drop a special message right here in the podcast feed, I’ll put it on social media, it’s gonna be very, very exciting. That’s this Wednesday.

Dan Pashman: All right, let’s get into it On today’s show, we’re talking with Yewande Komolafe, a chef and recipe developer living in Brooklyn. Yewande has a new cookbook out, called My Everyday Lagos, which includes her take on some classic Nigerian dishes, and some more modern variations. Nigeria is a place that Yewande once thought of as home. But as you may recall from an episode we did with her in 2018, when she moved to the U.S., she ended up losing her immigration status through no fault of her own. That meant she had to hide a part of herself. It meant she couldn’t go back. And it led her to ask: When you have to hide part of who you are, how do you connect with the taste of a place you used to call home?

Dan Pashman: Today, we’re going to re-air that original episode, then afterwards, we’ll share a new conversation with Yewande that we taped just a few weeks ago, on the eve of the release of her first cookbook.

Dan Pashman: Let’s start at the beginning of her story. Yewande was born in Germany, to Nigerian…