By Leah LeMoine | Photography by Carrie Evans on location at Heard Museum
Alana Yazzie has been busy since she was inducted into PHOENIX magazine’s Great 48 class of 2020. In the last four years, The Fancy Navajo recipe developer and lifestyle content creator gained thousands more followers on her social media accounts (@thefancynavajo), launched a food product and had a baby. “My daughter is 2 years old now, so we’re kind of getting in that phase of getting back into my usual business,” she laughs. This October, she’s celebrating something beyond business as usual: the publication of her debut cookbook, The Modern Navajo Kitchen: Homestyle Recipes that Celebrate the Flavors and Traditions of the Diné. “People are just really, really excited about it because it is something that hasn’t been seen, especially from a young Indigenous woman,” Yazzie says. We caught up with her as she was planning her autumn book launch.
You branched into packaged food! How did that happen?
That came about because there were a lot of people who wanted to try my recipes, and a lot of my recipes are [based around] blue corn, and they didn’t really have access to it. So, I put together my own little blue cornmeal mix… with juniper ash in it. Juniper ash adds a little bit of a different flavor to the blue cornmeal – more of a smoky flavor. And it adds nutrients like calcium and zinc… [and] helps darken the blue color of the blue cornmeal.
Super cool. And you can use it to make pancakes or bread?
The No. 1 thing people like to make is blue corn cupcakes, or blue corn cookies. And then, like you said, pancakes and waffles. I’m [mainly] using it for blue corn mush, which is kind of the typical thing that you make with blue cornmeal in the Navajo culture.
What would you say are some of the signature ingredients or flavors of Navajo cooking?
Smoky flavors. A lot of traditional Navajo foods are cooked outside. Earthy flavors are a big part of Navajo foods, specifically the Navajo or wild tea – that has a very earthy flavor to it. The addition of juniper ash to a lot of our cornmeal recipes adds a bit of smoky flavor to cornmeal dishes and helps deepen that corn flavor. And then obviously corn… the three varieties all have a little bit of a different taste from one another. Yellow corn is a little bit sweeter than white corn, and that’s a little less sweet than blue cornmeal.
Tell me about your journey to create a cookbook.
The cookbook came by a little bit of a surprise. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise, considering I’ve been working in this food space for quite a while. I was approached by the publishers to do a cookbook, and I was just like, “Oh my gosh. Is this really real? Can I do it?” … I made it very clear that The Fancy Navajo incorporates both modern and traditional ingredients, but more so on the modern aspect… A lot of Native cookbooks rely on traditional recipes. This will definitely be a newer type of book, where it has more modern recipes like Navajo boba tea and blue corn strawberry shortcakes. Just kind of seeing Native food in a more modern light.
How much of a say did you have in the aesthetic of the book? Obviously, you want it to be a continuation of your brand, which is vibrant.
I was just so happy when I saw [the cover]. I was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s pink!” That makes me so happy, because a lot of times in Indigenous foods or Native American cooking, there are specific colors that people attribute to it [earth tones]. I was really happy that they chose a brighter color [palette], and throughout the whole process they wanted to make sure that they were being respectful to my culture, even down to the designs on the border. They wanted to make sure that it was true to Navajo culture.
