Ask anyone in our family where Salma’s Kitchen began and they won’t point to a stove or a recipe. They’ll point to a Sunday.

Back home, Sunday had a rhythm. Church in the morning, and then the whole family would spill out toward one house, usually ours, for lunch. Nobody sent an invitation. It was simply understood. Aunts, uncles, cousins, the neighbours who had nowhere else to be. By the time the food came out, the table had grown twice its size and we were still dragging in chairs.

That lunch was never small. There were platters that took two hands to carry, dips scraped clean and refilled, rice that somehow multiplied. And there was noise, the good kind, the kind that fills a house.

When we came to Canada, we carried that Sunday with us. The city was new, the winters were strange, but the table stayed the same. It’s how we understood a place could become home: you set out the food, you pull up another chair, and slowly the room fills with people you love.

We started Salma’s Kitchen because we wanted to keep setting that table, just a little bigger this time, with room for our neighbours here in the Fraser Valley. Every kabab off the grill and every half-kilo of dip is us saying the same thing we’ve always said on a Sunday afternoon:

Sit. Eat. There’s more than enough.

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