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The Long Version

Now that we’ve gotten the professional bio out of the way, here’s the real story of how I fell in love with cooking and made it my career.

The early days 

My earliest memories of food are of our kitchen table, forever covered with a glossy floral plastic tablecloth and lined with a dozen pot holders. My mom would lay out several stainless steel containers, each filled with a different home cooked dish. Dal, roti, shaak (vegetables), and rice were always on the table, though the vegetables and spices varied by the day.

Fast forward to my teenage years, where I always felt a little out of place, constantly grasping for a way to fit into Small Town America (I dabbled in blonde highlights and Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts). But while my friends were busy sneaking out with boys, I began my own love affair with cooking.

I’d spend early mornings before school and evenings watching cooking shows on The Food Network, diligently taking notes by hand. On weekends, I’d curl up in the cookbook section of Barnes & Noble for hours. At 16, I cooked my first entire Thanksgiving for my family and my best friend’s family (read more here). 

A long, circuitous journey 

Cooking, however, was just a hobby, never a realistic career.

Like many children of Indian immigrants, I excelled at academics and the obvious choices were medical school, engineering school, or law school. Since I get queasy at the sight of a paper cut and my brain struggles with assembling basic IKEA furniture, law school made the most sense (and spurred on by legal internships at NGOs during college, I thought I could use the law as a tool to save the world). 

While I was at Harvard Law School, I enjoyed cooking gourmet meals for friends, but by the time I became an actual lawyer at a big Wall Street law firm, I had very little time to cook. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at my desk most days, while silently (and sometimes not so silently) wondering if adult life was supposed to be this miserable. 

A few years later, I started working for a nonprofit. While I still hated being a lawyer, I at least had better hours, which afforded me time to start cooking again.

Around the same time, I binge watched ten documentaries on factory farming, went vegan overnight, and felt inspired to start sharing what I was cooking on my brand new Instagram account. 

Eventually, after four years of waking up with dread and counting down the hours until the weekend, I decided it was time to live life on my own terms. 

I used my budding Instagram presence to land a job at an early-stage vegan food startup in NYC, where I wore many hats: recipe developer, food photographer, social media manager, copywriter, video director.

In the mornings before and evenings after work (and every single weekend), I’d work on my craft: veganizing recipes in my small Brooklyn kitchen, practicing food photography, and eventually getting behind the camera for videos (and being very awkward).

Writing My First Cookbook 

A little while later, I received an email from an editor at Penguin Random House, inquiring whether I wanted to write a cookbook for them.

My first thought was: I’m being scammed. 

After all, I was entirely unqualified. I had been sharing recipes online for just over a year. The Rainbow Plant Life website you’re now on was a tiny operation, with virtually no web traffic and just a handful of recipes, none of them particularly well-written (at least by today’s standards). 

It turned out not to be a scam, so I said yes, I would like that very much (because, of course). I worked at breakneck speed, developing, testing, photographing, and writing nearly 100 recipes in the incredibly short period of 5 ½ months, all while working full-time at the food startup. 

Whatever my editor saw in me—something I could not see at the time I received that initial email—ended up paying off.

My first cookbook, The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook (Avery / 2019), went on to become the authoritative cookbook on vegan instant pot cooking, with over 4,500 reviews on Amazon and having sold over 130,000 copies. 

Starting a YouTube Channel 

After a year or two on Instagram, I wanted a better way to share all the things I was learning about vegan cooking in a more in-depth way. So, I started a YouTube channel, fully unaware of all the tireless work and strategy that goes into the process. 

My first crack at YouTube was largely unsuccessful for many reasons, but something inside of me told me to keep at it. I filmed videos of myself awkwardly cooking outside in our overgrown garden (my kitchen at the time was too small and too dark) or at my partner’s parents’ houses (they had decidedly nicer kitchens). 

Once I found the courage to quit my food startup job and go all in on Rainbow Plant Life, I was able to take YouTube more seriously (I also had a more spacious kitchen by then).  

Within less than a year, the decision had paid off. I was developing a clearer vision of what I wanted my channel to be, I was starting to become more comfortable on camera, and in 2020, my videos began reaching hundreds of thousands and then millions of people.

From Passion to Actual Business 

When the pandemic started in 2020, my partner Max began working from home and started to see how many hats I was wearing in my new career: recipe developer, recipe tester, kitchen assistant, food stylist, food photographer, photo editor, videographer, video editor, blog writer, social media assistant, and more.

Max started helping me out with filming, and within a year, he became quite the expert videographer. This enabled us to consistently publish YouTube videos that met a certain quality, instead of my sporadic uploads with shaky footage and awkward transitions.  

As our YouTube channel began to grow, this website started to receive more traffic, and eventually things started to feel like a real business.

Instead of collecting all of my grocery receipts in a manila envelope and hoping I’d break even at the end of the year, Max registered Rainbow Plant Life as a business and started tracking our expenses and earnings. Within a couple years, we were making enough money for him to quit his job and work full time with me. 

In early 2021, I started working on my second cookbook. From the start, my vision for it was “the vegan bible,” a book that would codify the principles of great vegan cooking for years to come.

It took over 3 years for me to develop 150+ recipes, test them obsessively with my recipe testers Hannah and Callie (some were tested 20 to 30 times), photograph the recipes, and write the entire book.

There were A LOT of ups and downs to write (read more here), but when it was finally ready, I knew it was the best thing I had created. 

Big Vegan Flavor (Avery / 2024) was an instant New York Times bestseller, as well as an indie bestseller. It went on to be recognized as one of the best cookbooks of the year by NPR and Amazon and even received a prestigious James Beard nomination in 2025. 

In 2024, we also launched Meal Plans by Rainbow Plant Life, a weekly subscription service that helps thousands of home cooks meal plan and cook nourishing yet delicious meals throughout the week. 

At the end of 2024, I received another one of those emails that had me asking “is this a scam?” The NYT Cooking section(!) invited me to become a recipe contributor. 

These days, we have a small but mighty team helping to run the operations and behind-the-scenes of Rainbow Plant Life so that I can focus on the work I love the most: developing recipes, testing recipes, and making YouTube videos. Despite the immense amount of work and time involved, it’s such a rewarding experience to be able to connect with my audience.

And, of course, I feel so grateful that I’ve been able to turn my teenage dreams into an actual career. 

With love and gratitude,