Rabeetah - New Orleans, LA

Rabeetah shared: I do not have a strong sense of color. It’s hard to believe, walking through her Bywater home, bathed in yellow light. In the years I’ve known Rabeetah, she’s revealed a disarmingly honest approach to life. She ordered the chicken coop online. She doesn’t love the James Dean book end. She does know how to cook Pakistani recipes she learned from her chef mother. As a first generation American, her mother had to be creative with the food and equipment available to her. Rabeetah and I met when she came to Seasoned in search of unique tools to augment her robust collection. Her spice caddy is called a masala dabba (translates to box of spices in Urdu). It contains freshly ground cumin (she grinds herself), cumin seeds, coriander seeds, kashmiri chili pepper, and of course turmeric.

Rabeetah wrote: Every shirt I have is stained with turmeric. I don’t mind, I like to think it's stained with gold. The day I took pictures, chicken tandoori masala fragranced the open kitchen. Classic closed cabinets framed a refrigerator on one side of the room, and a stackable washer and dryer fit on the other side. The oven occupied a wall of its own. Rabeetah uses every bit of space to store her spices and heavy pots even the floor when necessary. Her partner, Max went to high school with Rabeetah but they did not get together until college. They like to say that they are each other’s salt, something that makes everything taste a little better and more like itself. In New Orleans, they have become a family with Cashew their dog and four chickens. Rabeetah has worked in education for seven years, and is taking a step back to write. She’s working on short stories that deal with the combined cultures of her parents and herself. And she works at Seasoned on Thursdays. Come see us and you may end up in a story.