In 2014, my family and I packed up our whole life in Iran and started a new one in Canada. New country, new language, very new winters. But the first thing that made our house feel like a home wasn’t any of that — it was the smell of rice steaming on the stove, the same way it always had, half a world away.

Cooking became my way of carrying home with me. When you can’t walk to your mother’s kitchen anymore, you learn to rebuild it — one pot of aash, one tray of fresh lavash, one stubborn attempt at the perfect tahdig at a time. Somewhere along the way I started writing it all down, and MigMom was born.

Why “MigMom”?

It’s short for migrant mom — because that’s exactly what I am. The name is a little wink at how this whole thing started: a young mother far from home, cooking to keep her family’s story alive in a new country. Migrating changes a lot of things, but it turns out it can’t touch what happens in your kitchen.

Three generations, one kitchen

Most of the recipes here I learned standing next to Mamany — my mother. She never measured anything; she just knew. A pinch of this, a handful of that, taste, adjust, taste again. Writing her recipes down properly, with actual cups and grams, has honestly been one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of this blog.

And a precious few go back even further, to my grandmother. Those are the oldest treasures in the collection — recipes that have crossed a century and an ocean to end up on your screen. When you cook one of them, you’re standing in a very long line of kitchens, and I love that you’re at the end of it.

So pull up a chair. Everything here started in a real kitchen, got argued over at a real family table, and is written the way I’d explain it to a friend. I’m so glad you’re here.

— Azadeh