Learning to cook helped me heal after my mother's death

Returning to Libya helped me reconnect with family and learn traditional recipes. I feel my mother's presence in my own kitchen, as I now have the confidence to cook and entertain.

In her life, food stretched far beyond nourishment. It was one enormous show of love, one tangible anchor of memory. I reveled in her cooking, but I never took interest in learning.

I was haunted by my lost inheritance. I survived off whatever I could unearth at the corner store, or the surprise aluminum trays full of home-cooked meals.

At 23, everything shifted when I left California to return to Libya and revisit the culinary traditions, enabling me to carry on my mother's legacy.

Read at Business Insider