I left Iran as a teenager, arrived in England with my family, and spent the next twenty years building a career in tech while quietly becoming someone who reads ingredient labels with genuine suspicion and has strong opinions about butter.
Eventually I got married, moved to America, and had two children who are smarter than me. Somewhere in the middle of all of it I discovered that the thing I loved most was making food with my hands and watching people’s faces when they tasted it.
The Tech Refugee is the name I gave this newsletter, and it means what it says, twice over. I escaped one thing at thirteen and another somewhere in my fifties, and both turned out to be the right call.
Three countries of food culture give you a particular kind of perspective. I have eaten tahdig with saffron rice in a Tehran kitchen, a proper Sunday roast in the English countryside, and discovered in California that growing your own apricots changes your relationship with fruit in ways that are difficult to explain and easy to taste. That range teaches you to notice the difference between food that was made and food that was produced, and to care about which one you are eating.
Each issue pairs an essay with a recipe I actually make for the people I love. The essays are about childhood, memory, family, displacement, parenthood, and the small losses that history does not bother to record. The recipes are the things I make because I believe that producing something real with your hands, something you can share with people you love, is not a consolation prize. It is its own serious thing, with its own rewards, available to anyone willing to pay attention and not rush the parts that cannot be rushed.
I make an apricot tart with apricots from my house that tastes like my father’s orchard outside Tehran. I make a berry chantilly cake that both my children agree on, which in this household counts as a diplomatic achievement. I was once outwitted by a donkey and have mostly made my peace with it.
If that sounds like your kind of place at the table, pull up a chair.
The Tech Refugee 