Women Who Travel Podcast: Two Best Friends Eat Their Way Round the World

13.06.2024 - 14:19 / cntraveler.com

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Mumtaz Mustafa and Laura Klynstra are best friends who love to cook—and host—together. Lale chats with them about how their respective childhoods in Pakistan and Michigan helped shape their passion for food, travels in Guatemala, and memories of Karachi street snacks and Dutch potlucks.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and in today's episode of Women Who Travel, we are talking about how a friendship develops and is deeply enriched through food. I'm joined by Mumtaz Mustafa and Laura Klynstra, co-authors of a beautiful new cookbook of 400 recipes, which they describe as a love letter to their Pakistani and Dutch heritages.

Mumtaz Mustafa: I'm so proud of my Pakistani heritage, and I feel like this, people actually don't know much about Pakistani food. Everyone knows Indian food. There are some similarities, but a lot of differences too.

Laura Kylnstra: I think Dutch food is very farm to table. The things that are really important in their cuisine are things that they grow and cheeses. You've got a lot of cows, you've got a lot of goats. They're all out grazing on these beautiful fields. The Netherlands is, I think, the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world.

MM: One of the most exciting things for me was to see Laura make some of the Pakistani food.

LK: I think people might think, oh, well, Mumtaz did the entire Pakistan chapter, but that's not how we did it. We broke it up by how it was made. The sweets and anything that was baked I made.

MM: She tried so many things from Pakistan, which was amazing for me because she'd never seen these street foods like this thing called Jalebi, which is these skilled people, it's like a form of acrobat or magic. They're putting these beautiful orange spirals in these big hot oiled filled pans, and Laura managed to figure it out, and she did a really good job.

LA: The book itself is about sharing food and hosting. How was food shared in your households growing up?

LK: Growing up in the Midwest, we might not have a lot of spices and all of the great things that Mumtaz has, but we do have a lot of comfort food, and my mom was known for being a good cook. People love to come to my house to eat, and all my friends were welcome, and she let them go through the fridge. She didn't care. She was just like: the more the merrier. She was just very welcoming. She also used to cook for church dinners at our church where she'd prepare food for a hundred people with another one or two women in the kitchen. She always showed love through food. Say somebody was sick or somebody had lost someone in their family, love was served in a