Grand Rapids cook combines Mediterranean and Midwestern flavors

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A Grand Rapids chef is putting her recipes in the spotlight as she puts her twists on traditional dishes.

Yumna Jawad spends most of her days cooking and experimenting on new dishes in her kitchen, while also creating memories with her family.

“My kids are learning to cook from me and they’re enjoying cooking a lot more than I did at their age, which is a blessing,” Jawad said.

Although cooking takes up a huge amount of her life now, Juwad didn’t always love cooking. She grew up in Sierra Leone in West Africa and said her mom would always be cooking.

“I actually hated cooking growing up because I would see my mom in the kitchen just laboring for hours, making her own yogurt from scratch, even making tomato paste from scratch, and I wanted nothing to do with that,” Jawad said.

When she was older, her family moved to the east side of Michigan. She decided to start cooking after moving away from her family and starting her own family.

“I realized I want to deliver what my mom delivered to us this whole time to my family and that’s when I started doing it,” Jawad said.

Her mom inspired her to put her twist on classic recipes.

“I didn’t have to follow the exact way that Lebanese recipes were made or the exact way that American recipes are made. And I can take you know, a spaghetti recipe, for example, and, you know, throw a different spice in there just to give it a little Mediterranean flavor,” Jawad said.

She started looking online for inspiration and new recipes to try and that’s when she decided to start her own profile called Feel Good Foodie. She started posting in 2013 and to her surprise, one of her recipes for baked feta pasta gained more than a million views.

“It was just amazing how quickly it caught on and how many people were so excited to make this recipe,” Jawad said.

The cook now has more than 4.5 million followers on Instagram and two million followers on TikTok. While she was gaining traction from her recipes, she started working on creating a cookbook, featuring all new recipes, the baked feta pasta recipes, her mom’s Fattoush recipe and her dad’s hummus recipe.

The Feel Good Foodie cookbook has 125 recipes inside with instructions and pictures with every recipe. Jawad said the dishes can all be made in 30 minutes or less and with 10 ingredients or less.

The book will be released on Tuesday.

Jawad will be having a signing event on Tuesday to celebrate the release at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The event is free to attend, you can register here .

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