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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Introducing Meta Glasses. Hey Meta, any last minute tables for a two tonight?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
Sure.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
There's a great Italian restaurant 15 minutes away.

**Yewande Komolafe** (0:11)
Hey Meta, where's the nearest flower shop?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
Five minutes away, straight down Broadway past the bodega.

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Their lilies are trending on Instagram. Just saying.
Hey Meta, am I forgetting anything else?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
How about setting a calendar reminder for next year?

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Meta Glasses, available in more than 20 styles.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:31)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily on Sunday.
Yewande 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 three 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 Yewande is back to work creating recipes and writing again. Today, Yewande 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.
Yewande, welcome to The Sunday Daily.

**Yewande Komolafe** (1:36)
Thank you for having me.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:37)
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.

**Yewande Komolafe** (1:48)
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 that'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.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:41)
What do you mean by that?

**Yewande Komolafe** (2:42)
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.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:03)
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?

**Yewande Komolafe** (3:13)
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 three to four days to recover from that. And so 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 going to see me for like 10 days because I'll be sick.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:04)
That sounds really challenging.

**Yewande Komolafe** (4:07)
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.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:37)
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.

**Yewande Komolafe** (4:47)
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 is specified.