There Were No Years in Between

Why certain foods don't just remind us of home they bring us back.

Some memories don't arrive because you try to remember them. They arrive because you taste something.

For me, it happens every summer. The first bite of a falsa. The smell of a perfectly ripe mango. Suddenly, I'm not standing in California anymore. I'm back in Lahore. The heat feels familiar. The trees seem taller. The afternoons stretch a little longer. Somehow, the years in between disappear.

It's strange how memory works. We spend so much of our lives believing home is a place. Then we leave it and discover it can hide inside something much smaller a smell, a texture, a recipe you've tasted a hundred times before.

Food has always done that for me. Not because it's extraordinary. Because it's ordinary.

It's what was quietly waiting on the kitchen counter. What someone packed before a long journey. What appeared without asking when you were tired, celebrating, grieving, or simply hungry.

Growing up, I never thought much about those moments. Like most children, I assumed they would always be there. It wasn't until I moved away that I realized what I'd actually been carrying with me all along.

One of those things was Panjiri.

In my family, it was never made with semolina or wheat flour. It was always roasted moong lentils, ghee, nuts, seeds, coconut, and cardamom. Crunchy, nourishing, and somehow familiar every single time.

For years, I made it only for myself. Not because I planned to start a business, but because every batch felt like a conversation with home. Eventually, I realized something. If one recipe could make me feel that connected to the people and places I loved, maybe it could become part of someone else's story too.

That thought eventually became Babo's Kitchen, a way to share a piece of home with people who might be looking for one too. Today, I still make the same family recipe just in a different kitchen, thousands of miles from where it began.

People often ask if Panjiri is granola. It's the easiest comparison, but it doesn't tell the whole story. It's something much older.

A recipe that's been carried across generations, across oceans, and now, into a new chapter. And that is what food has always done best. It reminds us that home isn't something we leave behind.

Sometimes, it's something we carry forward, one bite at a time.