Transcript of After Losing Her Limbs, Our Cooking Columnist Returns to the Kitchen

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Download it now at nytimes.com/app. From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily on Sunday. Iwande Komolafe is a cooking columnist here at The Times. She's worked for many years in restaurants. She's known for translating complicated restaurant dishes into recipes for the home cook. Her cookbook, My Everyday Lagos, was nominated for a James Beard Award. But almost 3 years ago, Komolafe's life took a dramatic turn when she nearly died in the midst of a sickle cell crisis. When she woke up from a weeks-long coma, she learned that her body would be profoundly altered by multiple amputations. Now, Iwande is back to work, creating recipes and writing again. Today, Iwande spoke with me from her kitchen in Brooklyn about what it has been like to return to her life after this crisis, and how cooking and food played an essential role in her recovery. It's Sunday, August 2nd. Iwande, welcome to The Sunday Daily.

Thank you for having me.

Before we talk about everything that you've been through, I wonder if you can explain what sickle cell disease is and how it affects the body for our listeners who are not familiar with this disease.

Yeah. So sickle cell is an inherited blood disorder. I was born with it. I've always known I've had it. And so the shape of normal cells are spherical. And in that way, normal cells are able to pass through your arteries, your veins, your capillaries. But sickle cells are literally sickle-shaped. And it's almost like it's like half of them missing. And in that way, when they try to pass through your artery, your veins, your capillaries, they sometimes get clogged. And that could result in a very painful crisis of, like, the joints. And it almost feels like a pain that you can't quite touch.

What do you mean by that?

It's like an internal pain. And I've grown up with this disease. I've always known I've had it. And I would also credit my family and my mom for teaching me how to take care of myself, both using natural medicine and using Western medicine.

How did all of that affect how you worked in the restaurant industry? Like, what kind of adjustments did you have to make in order to have the jobs that you did?

You know, it's interesting because I never thought of sickle cell as something that would hold me back. I understood that if I was able to take care of myself, literally drink a gallon of water every day, do things like that, pace myself through the work, get enough sleep and get enough rest, I can manage my disease. And so, if I worked a long shift, I knew that I needed like 3 to 4 days to recover from that. And so, it was a lot about— it was a lot of like just understanding my body to an extent where I knew that if I did go ahead and push myself to that limit, you're not gonna see me for like 10 days because I'll be sick.

That sounds really hard. Really challenging.

Yeah. And so it took a lot of coming to terms with the fact that I have it, even though it's easy for me to talk about now, but it wasn't always easy for me to say or highlight that, oh, like, I have this disease. And I think I was also in a position where I looked normal, like, compared to everybody else. I looked like I was normal, whatever normal was.

When you say normal, I'm curious what your life looked like when you were a recipe developer. I wonder if maybe you could just walk us through a typical day for you before this medical crisis happened.

Yeah, I feel like an average day for me would start by writing the recipes and then sourcing the ingredients. So, like, going around to different grocery stores, go to the markets and, like, feel and touch and see the vegetables that I was getting, and then start preparing them however the recipe specified. Mm.

Sounds like you were running around a lot.

Yeah. And usually, like, it would be depending on what I'm working on, I would be stovetop or like in the kitchen between like 1 to— I would say I sometimes went on till like 8:00 PM. Mm-hmm. But I'm always thinking about food. So it's, it's never really like there's like a turn on and turn off switch. It's like I dream about food, I dream about creating recipes, you know, and in my excitement sometimes I wake up and like jot that down or take notes if I remember my dreams. Oh wow.

So you dreamt about food. I can imagine that means that you have been quite passionate about it for some time. Where do you think that interest came from?

I think, I mean, I would say that my mom definitely, like, was the catalyst for that.

How so?

So I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and my mom was a food scientist. And she worked for Cadbury's chocolates, but she also would bring things home to sort of, like, test out on us as kids. Like what? Okay, so I remember this about my childhood is that we always had, like, a 5-pound bag of all sorts of candy. And it was usually stuff that she was working on. She was particularly working on how to develop a chocolate that's like shelf-stable in the Nigerian heat that doesn't completely collapse and dissolve. And like, she would try out the different tests on us. I saw it my entire childhood. And so moving here, I first signed up to be a biochemist like her and did not— that did not happen. But I had actually I actually encountered a pamphlet from the CIA while I was living with—

Yeah.

Oh, wait, the Culinary Institute of America.

Yeah. From the CIA. Yeah. No, no. Yeah. Not, not that CIA. Like the Culinary Institute. I thought this conversation was about to take a weird turn. Yeah. I had come across a pamphlet and I was like intrigued. I was like, oh wow, you could go to school to be a chef. And so I sort of like put that in my back pocket and I went to college and I felt like that was for my parents. And going to culinary arts school was— felt like the first decision that I made for myself.

Eventually, you transitioned from being in restaurant kitchens to being in your own kitchen, of course, writing about food, writing about not just cooking, but adapting recipes. It's one of the things that you have been known for. Can you tell us a little bit about what your life was like in November 2023, right before you got very seriously ill?

Yeah, it was great. I had just finished my first book and I was in the middle of my book tour. I had done a few events. I had gone to Lagos. I had gone to all the New York events. And my husband, my two kids, and I went to Paris for Thanksgiving. And we came back, we were all sick. We all had like contracted something, like, either in the airport or, like, just by flying. Like with the flu or a cold or something?

Yeah.

Well, we didn't know. We didn't know what it was, but we knew that we were all sick. Mm-hmm. Eventually, that weekend, I decided that I was in too much pain to try to treat it at home.

You mean sickle cell pain?

Yeah. So I went to the emergency room. We found out I had influenza A. Which is actually very deadly for people who are immunocompromised. And so I got dropped off at the ER by my husband. He took the kids back home. I only remember through several text messages that I sent both to my husband as like an update of the status. And what I kept saying was that I'm in a lot of pain. I'm still in a lot of pain. And I can tell from that that my pain wasn't being managed.

You don't remember this period?

Yeah, I don't remember this part, but I know what to ask for when I go to the hospital. I'm like, I need oxygen, I need fluid, like IV fluids, and I might need a blood transfusion. And I need pain medication. Those are the 4 things that I asked for. And this time, it felt like the things that I asked for were not given to me. And there was a whole series of errors that happened and weren't corrected. And that's why things escalated in the way that it did.

So what happened after that?

Woke up in a different hospital, completely different hospitals. You woke up?

Mm-hmm.

And everybody's faces look worried. I was told that I was in a coma for 6 weeks. Yeah. Wow. I was in a coma for 6 weeks. Wow.

So when did you realize that this was more serious than previous episodes that had sent you to the ER?

I think in the weeks after I woke up, Starting to look at all the scars on my body. The nurses would try to get me to do different things in stages and then realizing like, oh, I can't quite lift up my arm. Oh, I can't quite like lift my leg. Like what's going on? I also could— I couldn't see my legs because they were really wrapped up, but I could see my fingers and my fingers had turned black, like completely black. Oh my God. And so parts of my body died while I was in a coma. And there wasn't enough blood flow to certain parts of my body to continue circulation in a normal way.

Mm-hmm.

And so the decision was made to amputate those parts of my body.

And just to be clear, can you explain which parts? Well, it was—

so it was the fingers on both hands and the legs below the knee. And so I got amputated 9 fingers. I still have my thumb and also both legs below the knee.

Do you remember what you were thinking and feeling?

Yeah, I, um, I would say I was definitely shocked, but I also sort of like took a deep breath and I was like, okay. Like, I don't know that I processed it then. I think that I'm processing it now. It almost felt like I was in go mode, which it's sort of like a restaurant term where I was like, okay, like, we're gonna get through this. Let's go. Let's do this.

Like the same mentality of being a chef.

Yeah. It's like the same mentality of like being a cook. It's like go mode. Like, let's do this. Like service has been great. Like service is going on. It's super busy. Let's do this. Like we put our heads down. It felt like It was another step towards my survival.

Hmm.

Yeah. And I wanted to survive.

We'll be right back.

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Uwanda, you were in the hospital for a very long time. You were navigating all of these incredibly difficult things. I think anybody facing the kind of new reality that you were was probably not immediately thinking of food, but in your case, you have written about how returning to food played such a big role in your recovery. Tell us a little bit about how it did that.

So I couldn't eat because I was intubated, and then later when I was feeling a little better, I had a trach inserted into my throat. And I had this, like, ravenous appetite in my head, but I could not experience it in, like, a way where I was, like, experiencing food because I could not eat. And that felt, like, even more harmful than anything else because, like, it almost feels like food is, like, an assurance that I'm alive. And then when I got to the point where I could eat, I was only allowed like very mildly seasoned things. And that again felt like a type of punishment where it's like, I only get to eat applesauce and I can't eat anything with flavor, which is just like the worst.

Not what you were craving.

Not what I was craving at all. But I did start out slow. I started out with like ice chips. Like, can you swallow an ice chip without like coughing? So it was mostly like bread and just jello and applesauce for a while.

What were you craving?

Gosh, I was craving like the foods that heal me. I was craving like foods of my childhood. I was craving spicy food. I remember a friend came in and like mentioned something about jollof rice and I instantly woke up. I was like, jollof rice?

Um, so can you just describe jollof rice for people that don't know? Just describe it quickly for us.

Of course. Jollof rice is, uh, it's essentially a rice cooked in like a tomato, onion, and pepper sauce. And it comes out looking like bright orange, which is like delightful. And it's a very popular dish across West Africa. And then when I got cleared for being able to eat more things, I was well enough to start ordering my own food to the hospital and just like having someone meet the delivery person downstairs. And bring me food. And I started ordering like the most insane things.

Like what?

I started ordering like pepper soup from the Nigerian food cart that I knew that was on 42nd Street.

Hmm.

I started ordering carbonara daily almost. And I started ordering a lemon poppy seed muffin with a crumble of lemon poppy seeds on top. It was the most decadent, reintroduction to food and I was craving decadence in the way that I had never really done before. Like, I don't wake up and eat 10 croissants, but it felt like if someone was coming over and I knew that, oh, you're coming over from the outside world, bring me 10 croissants. Because all my friends remembered that I loved pastry and I still do love pastry. And so they would bring different types of pastries for me to try in the hospital, which was like such a delight.

What did they bring you?

I remember, well, this isn't a pastry, but I remember I would always ask Melissa to bring a salmon bagel, a smoked salmon bagel.

Is that Melissa Clark?

Yeah.

Who was a food writer.

Yeah. She would always bring me a smoked salmon bagel with capers and cream cheese and scallions, cream cheese. And it was wonderful. And because I didn't have mobility in my fingers, she would actually cut it up into little pieces and sometimes even feed me to just get me to eat because I couldn't do it for myself.

How did it feel to have somebody feeding you? I assume that this is the first time that's happened?

Yeah. I mean, as an adult, yeah. I think in those days after I woke up from the coma, I had been poked and prodded and not received a friendly, tender touch in a while. And so whenever my friends would come visit, I would hold their hands and they would sit with me and like beside me or like with me in bed. And it felt like I was craving not just foods, but I was craving just like a closeness.

Yeah.

And it felt like an intimate love.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you were finally able to get home, what— can you describe the new reality that you were now faced with? And in those early days, what were some of the adaptations you had to make?

I began to understand what happened to me. What I could do for myself has completely changed. I can literally open my eyes and sit up in bed, and that's the extent of it. Like, this has completely shifted our reality as a family and how I'm able to show up as a member of my family.

Can you give an example or two of what you mean by that?

Yeah, I think in the mornings, so Mark handles everything.

Mark, your husband.

Mark.

He gets the kids up. He gets them dressed. He makes them breakfast. He packs the school lunch. And I'm able to only observe. I can't participate.

How does that feel?

It feels like grief. It feels like I've lost a lot. Like, we've lost a lot. That's how it feels. This feels like the reality is hitting. Like, the aftermath of it is where the grief is. Not necessarily like the thought about having amputations, not necessarily like understanding like, oh, parts of my body died, but the impact is in the everyday. Of our life now.

When you're actually experiencing the loss in real time.

Yeah, the loss in real time.

We'll be right back. So, Iwanda, you've been home for some time now.

Yes, it's been 2 years.

And you are now, I understand, learning to use prosthetics. How has that been for you?

I remember when I first got them, they felt like props. And it was like, oh my God, these are so cool, but how do I use them? So I have upper body and lower body prosthetics. And I liken it to watching a baby learn to move their limbs. I have to sort of, like, retrain my nervous system to sense that, okay, this is a step that I want to take. I want to move my leg forward. And there's all these, like, muscles. And, like, I now have to do, like, stretches, like, 40 minutes every day stretches, like, tummy time. And with my upper limb prosthetics, they're like fingers, and I have to, like, place— put them in a specific way or shape to pick something up.

And you're also back to work now.

I am, yes.

Okay, so how did you go about doing that? Where did you start?

So I have a caregiver that comes every morning to get me up and get me into my wheelchair. And I actually started talking to my caregivers, like, where are you from? What kind of food do you make? And they'll be like, "Oh, I make a goat curry. I'm from Trinidad." And I was like, "Ooh, can we make that together?" So I would order all the ingredients and we would cook together in the kitchen. And like what I would do, it could be as like little as like whisking something that they hand me in a bowl. It felt really good to engage in that way and to see that My ability has changed, but again, like, my love and my passion for food is the same. I understood while I was in the hospital and afterwards that, like, cooking for me is innate. It's something that I'm both compelled to do and also something that I love to do. And I feel like nothing could take that away from me. And it made me think that, OK, I just have to figure out how to do this in my new life. So I spoke with my editor, Emily Weinstein.

I told her that I figured out a way that I could come back to work. And of course, she asked me what, and I was like, "I'm gonna need assistance to help me through the process of, like, submitting a recipe." And she said okay to that.

One of our producers, Tina Antolini, came to your home to spend a morning with you and your cooking assistant. Hello!

How are you?

Good.

I'm Tina.

Tina! As you worked your way through a recipe, just really just sort of observe what that process is now like for you.

We are frying mushrooms today. Oh!

When you have a recipe that you want to test with an assistant, how does that process start?

Okay, so first I come up with an idea, either by something that I've experienced before or something I've imagined. And on the day that Tina came, we were working on this interesting concept that I had for a fried mushroom sandwich, but I wanted the mushrooms to sort of get the fried chicken treatment. Where they are crunchy and crisp as a sandwich, and they sort of shatter when you bite into it.

Delicious.

I think we have a variety of mushrooms, like oyster mushrooms, and then there's like really skinny ones. Next, I write it all down in a recipe format, and to do that, I actually just talk to my computer. I send a copy of it off to my assistant. Uh, hi, I'm Ongi. Uh, I used to be the them pronouns. What background do you bring to doing this work with Yolande? I have worked in restaurants since like 2018, and I do tattoos. He did my tattoos. So they make sure I get the ingredients that I need for that specific day. Romaine in the fridge.

Thank you.

And every day starts at my kitchen table. The sandwich, the bread's going to be soft. That's why I'm not toasting it. It's just like— where we sit down together, go through the recipe. For this recipe, we're going to caramelize the onions first. Go through each of the steps because I kind of want that like oniony flavor in the oil while we're frying the mushrooms. Oh, sick! Wow, big— make sure that we each understand what's going on in the recipe. Then we can fry the mushrooms. And then we moved to the kitchen. Here we go. So my assistants do the chopping, the slicing. You actually don't need it that fine. I see you mincing and like, you don't need to mince. Roughly chopped. Roughly chopped. They do the blending. They do the pureeing. They also lift things onto the stovetop, remove things from the stovetop. They lift things from like cabinets that I can't reach. I'm gonna start frying, heating up the oil. They also, like, bring oil up to temp. Almost there. They tear apart, like, mushroom pieces. So this is like a big clump of mushrooms. Will you break that up, or—?

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

And then by doing it by hand, you get all of these irregular ridges. That tastes so yummy. They also drop things into, like, a bubbling vat of oil if the process is to fry something. It's like walking through each step of the recipe step by step according to how it's written. Want to taste it? So while they're working— It tastes good. I am tasting as they go. I like the sharpness and the garlicky flavor. I'm like taking my wheelchair over to the stovetop to check out what they're doing, how they're stirring, how they're folding. I'm listening out for whisking to listen to how a sauce is solidifying with the whisk. I'm sort of like an active observer. I'm gonna say that that's good. Okay. It's like caramelized and, I mean, deeply brown in spots. I'm very much present in the kitchen, and even though I'm not actively cooking the steps as they are, I'm actively listening and also taking notes. Like, sometimes I pause the cooking process, so like, I'm like, let me jot that down before I forget. When you say shaved instead of shredded, I'm thinking that like when you shred it and like grab a handful and like drop it, it should just sort of like collapse, like Inna, like, I don't want to say hair.

Got it. I got it. I have a tinsel. Yeah. Yeah, okay. All tinsel. I love that. And so it's about both of us, both me and my assistant communicating a lot about the recipe, about the cooking process, and about what's going on stove side. And so it's a lot of back and forth and communication. I would move it to a plate or like a board and cut it right through. I mean, it looks delicious. Like, I definitely want to eat that. At the very end, we both taste the dish together. We talk about it. We talk about what works, what doesn't. Look at that! And it's sort of like we go back to the drawing board to see what we made actually follows the format that I imagined. See, that's an obnoxious sandwich.

That's a whole meal.

Do you guys ever disagree? I just sort of imagine for somebody like you, maybe it was not super easy to hand over the actual cooking part to somebody else.

Yeah, I think working together with someone else in my kitchen, especially in the step where I'm creating a recipe, The disagreements that we've had have been mostly about like whether or not the way it's written will work. And what we're doing is trial and error. It's like different ways of like doing the same thing.

It sounds like it requires a lot of patience from both of you.

A lot of patience. Yes. Yes. A lot of patience. Tô— you want this patience, you know, cause like it's their like vision, their dream, you know, they have an idea of how they want to do it. And then because, you know, we're not the same person, there's so much patience that they have to like make sure that it's going the way that they want it. Yeah, but you know, it also requires you listening to me. Like I don't do this without them, you know, and like it's humbling. And I think patience has— like, this period of my life has, like, taught me so much patience with, like, learning to use my prosthetics. Like, I just have to be patient with myself to be patient with other people.

And that's also allowed you to go back to doing what you love.

Mm-hmm. Like, sometimes I— when I'm in the kitchen with an assistant, I would put on my prosthetics to like whip cream just to see if I can do it. And those minutes or those like times are actually quite thrilling 'cause it feels like me leaning into my former self and actually seeing the cream come together, like the heavy cream come together in like a soft whipped cream. And like, that's like, oh my God, I did that with a prosthetic hand. Like, that's amazing.

Food is sort of like this continuum between your old self and your present self, it sounds like.

Mm. Yeah. I love that, a continuum. Yeah, because now I'm able to experience food that I had before that I'm having now, sort of like the immigrant story where like, I've had a mango in Nigeria and it doesn't taste the same as a mango here, but now I'm able to like eat a mango and like close my eyes and like remember like, oh my God, like This is a mango of my childhood, you know, and that feels like a through line in my story where, like, food has just really helped me see the through line in my story.

Iwande, thank you so much for all of your time.

Thank you so much, Rachel. This was wonderful.

Today's episode was produced by Tina Antolini. It was edited by Wendy Dorr and had production assistance from Dalia Haddad. It contains music by Alicia Batutu, Marian Lozano, Rowan de Misto and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Rowan de Misto. Special thanks to Angie, Yowande's cooking assistant. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.

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