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

For decades, the kitchen was the centerpiece of Yewande Komolafe’s life. She spent long hours there, first as a restaurant cook and later as a recipe developer. But though she loved the often-intense culinary world, she had to navigate it with certain limitations: She was born with sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder, which required her to carefully manage her working life. She did so successfully, becoming a celebrated cookbook author and food writer for The Times.

A medical crisis in December 2023 changed all of that. Komolafe ended up in a coma for six weeks, and after emerging learned that both her legs and her fingers would need to be amputated. In this episode of “The Sunday Daily,” Komolafe tells Rachel Abrams about what happened and how, after everything, she made her way back into the kitchen.

On Today’s Episode:

Yewande Komolafe is a cooking columnist for The New York Times.

Background Reading:

How Losing My Limbs Turned Me Into a Different Kind of Cook

The Chef Imagining a More Accessible World, One Meal at a Time

Photo credit: Lanna Apisukh.

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