For decades, the kitchen was the centerpiece of Yewande Komolafe’s life. She spent long hours there, first as a restaurant cook and later as a recipe developer. But though she loved the often-intense culinary world, she had to navigate it with certain limitations: She was born with sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder, which required her to carefully manage her working life. She did so successfully, becoming a celebrated cookbook author and food writer for The Times.
A medical crisis in December 2023 changed all of that. Komolafe ended up in a coma for six weeks, and after emerging learned that both her legs and her fingers would need to be amputated. In this episode of “The Sunday Daily,” Komolafe tells Rachel Abrams about what happened and how, after everything, she made her way back into the kitchen.
On Today’s Episode:
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/yewande-komolafe" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Yewande Komolafe</a> is a cooking columnist for The New York Times.
Background Reading:
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/dining/yewande-komolafe-losing-limbs-different-kind-of-cook.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">How Losing My Limbs Turned Me Into a Different Kind of Cook</a>
<a href="https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/chef-accessibility" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Chef Imagining a More Accessible World, One Meal at a Time</a>
Photo credit: Lanna Apisukh.
Subscribe today at <a href="http://nytimes.com/podcasts">nytimes.com/podcasts</a> or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher">https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher</a>. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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