Your Mama's Kitchen Episode 38: Zarna Garg
Audible Originals presents Your Mama’s Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris
Zarna: I think quantity when I think food. When I make pasta, I automatically make a big pot. Even though there's one person eating it. But it's something I learned in my kitchen. And of course, that came with a lot of warmth and a lot of love. And Brown culture in general expresses a lot of love through food. We don't say, “I love you”, we just feed people constantly. Yeah, more. You're not hungry? No, there's no such thing. You had dinner? Have another dinner! (laughter)
Michele: Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. I'm Michele Norris.
Today, we talk to someone who is truly a real Renaissance woman. I'm talking about Zarna Garg.
She is a screenwriter, producer, content creator, mom, wife, and, as you’ll hear in this conversation, a bit of a broccoli evangelist.
All these parts of her coalesce into someone who’s a natural at comedy. This law school grad had a seamless career transition to the world of stand up comedy, and Zarna’s daughter was the one that nudged her.
Since then, she’s appeared on the TODAY Show, This American Life, stand-up stages across the country and she’s had her own stand-up special.
Let me tell you something about Zarna. She is just plain fun — charming, vulnerable, matter-of-fact, warm. In this conversation, she guides me through her long, winding life, from the threat of an arranged marriage when she was young to carving out a path of her own and finally, building a loving family with a marriage, on her own terms .
Plus how to take broccoli to new heights. I know I know. I was skeptical myself because broccoli is just…. broccoli. But you have not had Zarna Garg’s broccoli!! Her recipe. Her comedy. And taking her family along for the ride as a standup comedian. That’s coming up.
Michele: Zarna Garg, I'm so glad you're with us. I've been looking forward to this conversation.
Zarna: Thank you so much for having me, Michele. This is… It's so fun to talk about food, all things food. And I'm very excited to be here.
Michele: I love talking about food, and I love talking to you. I've gotten to know you a little bit through your special, through your videos, through your podcast, through your presence on Instagram, which is fairly constant in my feed. My feed has figured out that I like your videos because they serve them up to me a lot.
Zarna: Well, I paid them to do that.
Michele: Oh, you made them do that. Okay. There's a little bit of sorcery behind that you're serving up all those videos to me. But we always like to get to know someone's origin story as we begin our journey in each of these conversations. So you grew up in India?
Zarna: Yes, the city of Mumbai. So I didn't grow up and I grew up in a very cosmopolitan neighborhood of Mumbai, a very affluent part of Mumbai. And as I like to say it, I am the world's first riches to rags story. Because, I found a way to lose everything I was born with. I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth, in a family that was very affluent by the time I came around. I'm the youngest of four. So my parents, you know, had a very lovely home in South Mumbai, which is like the equivalent of Park Avenue in Manhattan. And we had a beautiful home, big home, which is a huge luxury in India, even for the wealthy, because space is such a premium. And I grew up with a mom who loved to cook, but not cook anything I liked. So she spent her time making all these foods that at that time in my childhood, I was obsessed with American culture. I was reading American comic books. I was watching all the movies, bootleg copies of all the sitcoms that were playing here. We used to get, like, do you remember Three's Company? Come and Knock on My Door, all of those shows I grew up in, with. And because I grew up with those, you know, none of those people were ever eating like, lentil soup.
Michele: And that's what your mom was making.
Zarna: Yeah.
Michele: She was making her Indian fare.
Zarna: Indian food. And I was like, but everybody I watch and like is eating pizza, so why am I stuck eating this? And, you know, my childhood was a lot of aggravation for my parents about everything because I was so American. But just born in India. I know that now. I was meant to live in this country. I just grew up in the wrong place. And I was born in a very, conservative family. My siblings were all arranged early in life.
Michele: Meaning that their marriages were arranged.
Zarna: Yes. So my sister was married at 16 or 17. My brothers were both married before they turned 20. That's what was kind of expected from me. And, my mom passed unexpectedly before I turned 15. And my dad, the day after, her dad said, you need to get arranged. I'm done parenting. Which, if you're familiar with those cultures back there, they just say it. You know, in America, there's, like, a stigma attached to saying something like that, especially as a parent. You're supposed to love every aspect of parenting, and you're supposed to love your kid unconditionally. I think the world that I came from, people just said it. This is exhausting. It was a mistake. And that's when the whole drama in my life started. Because I didn't want to get married. Because you know why? Because of Three's Company. People were not married, and they seem very happy.
Michele: Is it that they were not married or they were not married at 15?
Zarna: They were not married at all. I remember Three's Company, Suzanne Somers, no one even talked about marriage. That's what I learned in the Western media, pop culture in America. I'd never, like, went on and on about marriage the way the eastern cultures did. And I learned that that life could be different.
Michele: So there's so much going on in your life. At 15, you just lost your mother. Your father is trying to get you not just to date someone, but to marry someone to make a lifetime commitment at age 15. He's telling you that. And this has got to be hard to hear. I'm tired of parenting. I'm ready for you to go, and you have to make a decision. And at that time, did you have any time, any bandwidth to think about your mom?
Zarna: You know, I'll be honest with you. At the time, it didn't hit me what I had lost. In that moment, even though everybody around me was very upset and upset for me, I don't think I fully realized the loss of a parent until many years later. You know, because my mom and I had a very contentious relationship in a mother teen way. Not anything very out of the ordinary, but we used to fight so much when I was a teen that it didn't really occur to me that her absence forever would mean something so dramatic. I was a self-obsessed 14, 15 year old living in my own cloud world of American pop culture in India. I was living in the clouds in my head. And when my dad said, you need to get married, I thought for sure he's having a momentary lapse because he's shocked himself and that he would come around. And in the meantime, I was going to go have sleepovers with all my friends. That's how I saw it in my head. But he never came around and he thought I would come around and I never came around. And that created all the tension in our life.
Michele: So you started to stay with friends because he was saying, did he give you an ultimatum? Either you.
Zarna: Yeah. He was very clear that if you don't want to get married, you can't stay here anymore. And I really thought that this is the grief of the moment talking. And, you know, when you're 15 and you're like, okay, I'll, you know, I have so many friends. And then you go stay with your friends for two days, and then their mom is like, I think you need to go back home. And that's when it hits you. Oh my God, this whole sleepover thing is not a permanent solution. But I was too scared to go home because, I mean, my dad was a success story in his own right, had built something huge for himself, and people were scared of him. In that world, when you become larger than life, everybody around you listens to you. So no one was even willing to take me in because they were afraid to upset him. And I was scared to go back because I thought he would push me into a marriage for sure.
Michele: Did you just keep moving from friend to friend?
Zarna: So I was, what in America they call couchsurfing for a while. Yeah, for a year.
Michele: Couchsurfing?
Zarna: Yeah. And the only person who was willing to take me in and let me do whatever I wanted to do was my sister who lived in America. And I had to find a way to come from India to America if I wanted to live a life of freedom and academia, which is what I wanted.
Michele: Did your rebellious nature help you? And that that you were, you know, you had a little bit of grit in you. That's one question and two. Is this where you started to develop your funny bone? Because if you were staying with other people, did it make it easier for them to open the door to you and to keep that door opened If you brought light into their life. If you look into their life. If you bought music into their life.
Zarna: So the rebellious nature, the jury is out because there are days now, as a 40 something woman, where I'm like, I should have just gotten arranged. What possessed me to fall in love? Because, you know, the arranged life is a smoother path for those who do it right. You just have to appease one mother in law and you're fine. It's not even about the husband. No one cares. But I do think that a million doors opened for me back then, because I naturally kept things funny. Like I knew how to alleviate the stress in any situation. I could walk into any room and bring the temperature down, so to say, you know. I know that now. For all my life, I had no idea this was a skill or anything, but I've read how other comics have started, specifically Kevin Hart. When I read his book, I was like, this is my life story because there is a part of his book where he talks about how he got invited to things because he kept things light. And I do believe that that was the root of my comedy ability, which obviously I didn't discover until 30 years later.
Michele: Yeah, yeah. And we'll talk about that. Your daughter had something to do with that. We'll talk about that. But just to continue with your journey before you, you know, you have a sister who's willing to take you, in America. But that means leaving India, and that means leaving everything that, you know. And I'm just thinking about, you know, at 15. What you think about your mom then, as you were just trying to figure out how to move forward and maybe not processing what you now recognize as grief. Now, as you're in your 40s and looking back at that moment. I'm thinking about the things that we learn from our parents. And in this show, one of the things that we've learned episode after episode is that the kitchen winds up being a classroom of its own. (Yes). And as you think about your mom, who was not serving you pizza or tater tots, sorry about that, but was making a hot meal every day for her family. What was her kitchen like, and what were the lessons that you learned in that kitchen, and how has that helped you move forward as you came to America and started a new life?
Zarna: The kitchen was filled with a lot of food. Enormous amounts of food. And my mom was well known to be very generous and very magnanimous with food. She was always feeding everybody at all times. All of our me and my sibling’s friends came over people who worked in and around our building, the whole thing. I learned to think of food in vast quantities in Mike, the kitchen that I grew up. But today, as a 40-something woman who is trying to take control of her health and talks to doctors all the time about healthful living and longevity. I kind of wish that it had been a little different because yes, it was warm and loving and cozy, and it felt like a feast was happening all the time, even though it was not a feast of the foods that I loved. The environment was very lively, you know, in a way that the culture of the kitchen was very happy and and vibrant. But today, as a 40-something woman who is struggling with her weight and struggling to feed my own kids, I remind myself that the kitchen has to serve a better purpose than just feeling like it's a feast, because feasting so much has not helped me in my health. I'm lucky I don't have any major health issues right now, but it is a problem because I think quantity when I think food. When I make pasta, I automatically make a big pot. Even though there's one person eating it. But it's something I learned in my kitchen. And of course, that came with a lot of warmth and a lot of love. And everybody who knew my family back then associated my house with, like, you want to have a great meal? You stopped by at my house because my mom will feed you.
Michele: I love the picture that you're painting and I can see a big spread. And I can understand how then that gets in your head. Like, I can just make. I can't cook for one, right? Because what if someone shows up? What if someone leaves the table hungry? I just have to make a massive amount of food.
Zarna: Yes, and that's how I express love. The more I make, the more love. I'm like, Brown culture in general expresses a lot of love through food. We don't say, I love you. We just feed people constantly. Yeah. More. You're not hungry? No, there's no such thing. You had dinner? Have another dinner.
Michele: We come from different brown cultures, but this is speaking to me, I understand.
Zarna: Do you? I'm sure you've experienced it. So. Yes. Yeah. And it's just.
Michele: What do you mean, you're not hungry?
Zarna: The thing is that now when I. When I talk to my doctor friends and of course, as an Indian woman, I have a million doctor friends. We all laugh about the culture we were born with and we grew up with. What were we thinking? You know, ghee, which is the Indian clarified butter. Our parents taught that the ultimate act of love was to add an extra big spoon of ghee in everything we ate. I mean, pure saturated fat. And we grew up thinking that that. Oh, that means our parents love us.
Michele: So when you got to Akron, was that the end of your period of couch surfing? Because as you were moving through friends and cousins’ homes, you were always looking at the clock wondering, is this the day that they're going to tell me that I have to leave and find someplace else? When you got to Akron, could you finally breathe a little bit easier?
Zarna: Yes, for sure, for sure. And my sister, God bless her, her and her husband are amazing superstars. They were willing to keep me forever because, you know, I think I was not a bad influence on their kids, which I was also conscious of my nephews. I think I brought joy to their life, which I wasn't even aware of at the time, to be honest with you. It's just who I am wherever I go. And I think my brother knows himself as a doctor. Really understood the importance of academia. Understood my love for it. So I didn't have any pressure from them. But if you've ever lived in somebody else's house, you know that in your mind, you know that's not your house. Do you know what I mean? No one put pressure on me, but I put it on myself. I was like, what am I going to do to settle my life? Because this cannot continue indefinitely.
Michele: So what did you do?
Zarna: I mean, I finished college in Akron. I went to law school in Cleveland, which is very close to Akron, at Case Western Reserve. And when I finished Cleveland, I was like, I need to settle my life somehow. And of course, because I didn't know what I was doing at all and I was alone a lot, I decided I'm going to find the person I'm going to marry. I have to find a person to marry so I can build a life in the way that I knew how to build a life. Which is what I had seen my whole life in arranged settings. Two people get married. Then they build a life together.
Michele: Just for people who may not understand arrangement. It's that the families make the arrangement. Families get together and decide this is a good match. And it's not just based on the two individuals that are going to get married. It's the families are also a good match. Could you just explain that?
Zarna: Yes, yes. So the families decide what two family cultures would be a good match. The individuals are kind of lower in priority and they need to match somewhat like if the guy is 5’10, you want a girl who's five foot five, which is a tall girl in our culture. So, they would do some sort of basic matching with height and weight and they will even do skin color. I'll just say it. In India, it's prevalent. It's everywhere. They'll be like, “my son is so fair and is your daughter fair?” All these things. But over and above all of that is the idea of does this family like this other family, do our values align? What do we believe in? Have we known each other long enough to know that the other people are good people? Because that's a whole thing. What village did you come from? What village did you come from? So I had seen my siblings get arranged like that, three of them, that part doesn't work for anybody who's even a little bit rebellious. That part does not work for a girl who is not tall and slim and fair. And if you're not all those things, that path is not the ideal path for you. You’ll still find a match. But they're going to discount you ten different ways. A matchmaker will openly say, you're not going to get a doctor, you're too short. All the things that people get shocked at hearing and seeing in America are openly discussed outside America, especially in the brown nations. So I kind of knew that if I wanted to find a life partner, I would have to do it myself. I believed that a great life partner for me was out there, but I just knew that I would have to figure out where he is and who he is myself.
Michele: Did you ever think about calling home to your dad and saying, okay, I'm ready to do this, let's find that arranged marriage? Or was that not a possibility at all?
Zarna: At that point, he had cut off all communications with me, so I didn't think he was interested in talking to me at all. And I don't think that in his very hardcore, conservative, arranged set up. By that point, I was too old. I was almost 21. I was too old in that world. And not in the world at large, but in that world. And then I was going to go to law school. Of all the jobs that you would dread for your daughter in law to have. I think being a lawyer would be, you know, not only have opinions but actually do something with those opinions. What was my dad going to go into his arranged marriage market with this woman who was too short, whose nose is too big, who speaks loudly and as a lawyer?
Michele: So you had to do this yourself? And you knew your partner was out there and you were going to find that partner. How would you do it?
Zarna: So luckily for me, in 1997, America Online was a thing which I don't even know if you know AOL. Remember? So AOL, their big tagline back then was open up your world. And I remember sitting in Cleveland thinking, oh, I need to open up my world. Let's go. So for $19.99, we opened up our world every month. And I saw that personal ads had now started moving to the internet. It was so new. This was pre all the big apps and the big websites.
Michele: Best before Bumble and all these dating apps.
Zarna: No Bumble, no tumble, none of them. So I wasn't meeting very many Indian men in Cleveland, Ohio, but I knew that there was a bigger world out there. So I found this extremely primitive website for matchmaking, which doesn't even exist anymore because it's now iterated into ten different forms. And, I put an ad for myself on it, which was very much based on everything I had seen in an arranged world, because I had no context. I had never dated anybody. Dating was not a thing people in my world did. So I wrote out an ad, pretty much how my dad would have spoken to a marriage broker in India. You know, you need to be this. You need to be that. And I'm this and I'm that.
Michele: What did the ad say?
Zarna: I mean, it was batshit obnoxious. I'm actually embarrassed to talk about it now. I was so obnoxious. I was like, you know, I'm looking for somebody to marry. I was very clear about that. I was not looking for friends because at the time I was living in America and the most popular sitcom was Friends. And that sitcom actually terrified me, horrified me because no one was ever getting married. And it was all like, I'm dating, I'm not dating. We're on a break. We're not on a break. Then they're dating each other. Like switching up the combinations in the friend group. That was so scary to me that in my ad very clearly said, I am looking to marry somebody.
Michele: And that may have been interesting to you as a 15 year old when you were watching, like Three's Company. Like, that's kind of because that's kind of evolved into Friends. But at this point you were looking for a life partner. That was where you were at.
Zarna: At this point, my mind is filled with fears that everything my dad said was right. And now I'm thinking maybe he wasn't crazy and maybe he's right that if I'm old and no one's going to want me. And why did I get this degree and what does this mean? And then I'm watching Friends where all these women have jobs, but they're constantly unhappy. So I learned from that. And I said in my ad, I will write, I am looking for marriage. I am looking for a smart, ambitious guy. And please don't write to me if you want to be friends because we're not going to go down that road. And I was very direct, almost to a fault, beyond a fault honestly. I was like, I might need to see your tax returns because I don't know if you actually work. Because I wasn't sure. How do you do due diligence in America? In India, the due diligence happens through the elders. You know, they call each other's neighbors and friends and find out. How do you do that? So I was like, I might need to see tax returns. I might need to know where you work so I can call them and verify.
Michele: You're going to fully vet this dude?
Zarna: Yeah. Because that's what made sense to me. And here's the thing. The ad was crazy, but I got so many responses and I ended up talking to so many people. I mean, all these men flew into Cleveland from all over America to meet me. It didn't work out for the most part. And then I got a response from a guy sitting in Switzerland, in Zurich. Saying this ad isn't real, is it? And I said, it's very real. What are you talking? And he goes, this is obnoxious. This is crazy. Who writes like this?
Zarna: And I was like, I write like this. And I'm doing it because I'm on a serious mission. I don't know what you're doing. And we kind of struck up a friendship, even though I wasn't supposed to be friends with anybody. Life got the best of me. And of course I'm today married to him. We just finished 25 years of being married together.
Michele: Congratulations.
Zarna: We don't say a word to each other. That's how we stay married.
Michele: Well, you say something to each other because he shows up in your podcast.
Zarna: That's business. That's business. Well, very like, we don't do I love you. We don't. You know, we live in our own little bubble of immigrant approved life.
Michele: And it's interesting. Early on, you said that you wondered if you should have taken the arranged marriage path because arranged marriages are just easier. You just have to please the mother in law. But in this case, your mother in law seems like she is present in your life. And is that sort of a third party in the marriage?
Zarna: Not in the way that I joke about, because she's actually very present in my life and I have an excellent relationship with her. I make mother in law jokes because as a community, we haven't really opened that door yet. I'm the first woman to open that door. But I, in real life, get along with my mother in law. She has given me her blessings. Just say whatever I want about her. And I actively sought those blessings out before my first comedy special hit the airwaves.
Michele: Because you do talk about her in that special.
Zarna: And that I do. And it's not all nice. No. But she understands the spirit in which we do this, and she understands that it's jokes, but she is a presence. Look, the in-law relationship is complicated, even in good circumstances.
Michele: So are you talking about this in part to push that door open, to say, hey, we need to have this conversation about the in-laws and how much control they exert over individual marriages. Is that part of the reason that you're making this comedy often has a lot of things going on. I actually believe that some of our most honest conversations about our most difficult topics, whether it's race, whether it's gender issues, whether it's poverty and what it means to be poor, the most honest conversation about those things often happens on a comedy stage. So are you using your comedy to talk about our maternal relationships and particularly our in-law relationships and how sometimes controlling or maybe even toxic they can be?
Zarna: You know, honestly, when I looked into comedy as a career, which I had never in my life imagined until five years ago. When I first looked into it, I assumed that thousands of women must be doing this. I just don't know them. And then the more I looked into it and I realized no one is in our culture, in the brown world, joking about your mother in law is actually taboo. Even if they're setting you on fire, you're supposed to respect them. You know what I mean? So the thought that I'm the only woman, even right now, five years later, doing it by myself in the whole world is shocking to me. But because I'm in this position now, I take it very seriously. This was not how it started, but this is what it has evolved into.
Michele: I love your comedy story that you didn't see yourself as a comedian. You worked in the home, you have three kids, and you ran the home while your husband ran the business, and your daughter was the one who pushed you, who always thought you were funny, who filled up a water bottle with all these little sayings, trying to get you to just try to step out into comedy. I love that it was your family that pushed you out into this world because they saw how funny you were and saw that the world should share the humor. And now that you're a comedian, you've pulled your family along with you into your comedy because your videos often feature your kids. Are they willing participants in this? Because they're in and are they willing participants? And why are you always cutting pineapple?
Zarna: I'll answer both. So I like to say that I run a family business and I'm the face of it. My kids have been part of it since day one. We all did it innocently, not knowing what it was going to become. We did it with love. We did it for our community. We did it thinking if we can spread a little bit of joy, there's no harm in it. And then it all got exasperated during Covid. When I hit social media, my son put me on TikTok and we realized that we were bringing joy to so many millions of people, and we really did it out of love, without any real grand agenda of what we were going to do. It grew and grew and grew, so they've been part of it since day one, and they've grown with it. And everywhere my kids go, my husband goes. People tell them what our work means to them, what my work means to them, which keeps them ingrained and wanting to be a part of it. So we're in this together. We're hoping that we're putting good work out into the world and making people laugh. At the same time. Now, the pineapple thing is a very practical reason. A Caribbean mom taught me once, 20 years ago, that the right way to cut and eat a pineapple is to cut it and rub it with salt and wash it, because the salt draws out the sweetness. I have no idea if this is true or not, but she taught me 20 years ago, and I've been doing it like that for 20 years. And beyond the cutting of the pineapple for the videos, it's the rubbing of the salt that caught everybody's attention and made it fascinating. Now Indian people eat fruit with black salt on it all the time. So I do think there is some connection to the salting of the fruit and the sweetness being drawn out. But I'm not a food scientist or anything. I just learned how to do it from a woman who came from a land where they eat a lot of pineapples, and it became the story. And now the rubbing of the salt has taken off its own life. And I continue to do it because my audience seems to love it.
Michele: It's interesting that you now spend so much of your time in the kitchen. Beautiful kitchen, by the way. Has your relationship to the kitchen changed from what you saw growing up in India and now living in the New York City area, and sort of ruling the roost from your kitchen and talking to the world from your kitchen. Has your relationship to the kitchen changed in terms of your, not just as a place for you to practice your craft of comedy, but also how you feed your family?
Zarna: Yes, completely. Because I'm in tune with where the world is today. I'm in tune with what is required for healthy living. I want to give my kids the tools and the ability to live a healthy, long life. All three of my kids are athletes, so it is very important to me that they learn how to eat and feed themselves in easy, nutritious ways. I obsess over that. Like there's some people who take a lot of pride in making extremely elaborate dishes with 20 ingredients. I have no interest in any of that. I think if you can feed yourself with simple foods and healthy and nutritiously. You're so far ahead of the curve in, from a health point of view. Because I grew up eating very fancy foods at home. Very. Like my mom made it all. Everything you've seen in any Indian restaurant my mom knew how to make. What it has done is that I never really learned an appreciation for simpler foods. We never, you know, in India, but we, like Indian people, will laugh at like a salad, like, oh, that's food. But truthfully, we know today from a health point of view that eating salads and eating raw vegetables and eating very lightly cooked vegetables is actually better for your health. So I have no interest in being a mother India in the kitchen in that way. I'm much more preoccupied with the health ramifications of what we do in the kitchen. And I like to believe that I've given my kids some very good habits and in fact, not just my kids. All the kids who ever come into my house, they know they have to eat a bowl of broccoli while they're there. They just have to. I don't know why it became a thing 15 years ago, and we've done it forever. And it's like it's a thing we've continued. And countless mothers have texted me their thanks that my kid learned how to eat steamed broccoli at your house. Would never do it at my house.
Michele: But they have to eat a bowl of broccoli?
Zarna: Steamed broccoli.
Michele: There's always steamed broccoli on your stove on one of those six burners. There's always steamed broccoli going. Why broccoli? And why did that become the taste of the Garg household?
Zarna: Because it's easy. It's nutritious. It's a superfood. Steaming. It takes two minutes. I feel like wherever these kids go in the world, whether they're in a dorm room, you can steam it in a microwave. Anywhere you go, you can carry a broccoli head with you.
Michele: So we always ask people to leave our listeners with a recipe. We gift our listeners with a recipe every week. And I heard that steamed broccoli was the recipe that you wanted to gift our listeners. And I have to admit, I was like, steamed broccoli? Because it seems rather pedestrian, but it sounds like you really have a way to sort of tart it up in interesting ways. So what is so special about the steamed broccoli that you serve in your house?
Zarna: Well, first of all, we only steam it very lightly because we've learned now from health class that less cooked vegetables are better than overcooked vegetables. So only steam it very lightly, drizzle it with the best olive oil you can get. And it doesn't have to be expensive, just good olive oil from your regular grocery store. One twist of salt and pepper. That's the basic steamed broccoli that the kids and their friends like. Now we can dress it up and make it more fun.
Michele: Oh, let's dress it up. What do you do?
Zarna: So in India, there's a process called tempering. You know, where you heat the oil and temper all the spices that India is so famous for. So you can heat a little bit of olive oil, add some mustard seeds, cumin seeds, curry leaves. And when they start popping out a little bit of turmeric, red chili powder, a little bit of garam masala even, which is like a masala that you can get at any Indian store, which is basically a mix of all the big Indian spices. You can add all those things in the tempering and then pour that tempering over the broccoli and just lightly mix it so you're not eating, spoons and spoons of curry and cream and sugar. It's so lightly drizzled and it's just a hint of Indian turmeric and taste. Because I also do believe turmeric is very, very healthy. I'm a believer. So I try to temper turmeric and put it on broccoli. And that's like a superfood in my house. Everybody who's come in has eaten it at some point. Llike you could stop by for a cup of coffee and I'm going to be like, but have a cup of broccoli.
Michele: I actually do want to stop by your house. I actually want to visit you one day. I want to come and spend some time in your kitchen.
Zarna: And if you want to go really nuts and like, go all out with the broccoli situation after the tempering, you can grate a little bit of parmesan cheese and add some nuts. I like pine nuts. I'll add pine nuts to it. This simple vegetable and five minute recipe ends up being delicious. I'm telling you, it's savory. It's clean, it's easy. None of the ingredients I mentioned are expensive. Everything is easily accessible, and any number of kids learn to do some version of this in my house and now have gone on to do it in their own house.
Michele: That's beautiful. That is really beautiful. Zarna, I loved talking to you. This has been so much fun. Thank you for giving me an idea for our menu for dinner tonight, because broccoli will be on the menu tonight, and I'm going to try the tempering to see if I can capture some of that delicious flavor and aroma and add spices slowly. And I'll let you know how that goes. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
Zarna: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and namaste to all your listeners.
Michele: Namaste.
Michele: It takes a special kind of person to experience that kind of pain and uncertainty so early in life – and come out on the other side so funny, so sharp, so caring.
And to her credit as a comedian, as a producer, as a mom… Zarna Garg may be the only person that got me quite this excited about steamed broccoli. I’ve tried her technique and it’s fantastic. You were going to want to try that so you can find the recipe at our website yourmamaskitchen.com. We will also post it on my Instagram page at Michele underscore underscore Norris. That’s two underscores.
And one last thing….
So glad you’ve taken the time to listen to us – but here’s a note from one of our listeners…
Listener: Yeah, my mom does not like to cook, but she does love Facebook and she loves Amazon. So whenever she goes onto those sites, she will see an ad for a new cooking appliance and she will buy it, and it will be in the kitchen the next day. And there's like this Japanese water boiler that she found there. All you have to do is, like, press a button and it gives you really hot water. And I find it very helpful, like when I want tea and ramen. But it's like one of those things I was like, I did not know this existed. But she also has like a bread maker that she's only used a couple of times, but after that, like it's collecting dust. So whenever going to kitchen, I just think of all these like different gadgets that she finds on the internet that I'm like, oh, this is really cool but I never knew existed. It's very fun to find whenever I'm in her kitchen.
We’re opening up our inbox for you to record yourself and share some of your mama’s recipes, some memories from YOUR kitchen growing up, or your thoughts on some of the stories you’ve heard on this podcast. Make sure to send us a voice memo at Y-M-K AT Higher Ground Productions DOT com… for a chance for your voice to be featured in a future episode!
Thanks for joining us! See you next week and until then – be bountiful.
Michele: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original. Produced by Higher Ground Studios
Senior producer - Natalie Rinn
Producer - Sonia Htoon
and associate producer- Angel Carreras
Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryo Baum.
Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camila Thur de Koos.
Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris.
Executive producers for Audible are Nick D’Angelo and Ann Heppermann.
The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.
Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media.
Talent booker - Angela Peluso.
Special thanks this week to Threshold in NYC.
Head of Creative Development at Audible: Kate Navin
Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiazza
And that’s it - goodbye everybody.
Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.
Sound Recording copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.
