Yazzie grew up in Fruitland, New Mexico, a small rural town outside Farmington near the Four Corners area, by the San Juan River. On the other side of the river is the Navajo Nation. Yazzie says she had "the best of both worlds" in Fruitland and recalled her days of going to school, coming home, making dinner and then hoping she'd get the chance to go into "town."
"I had access to more resources like grocery stores and restaurants as opposed to someone who may live in the middle of the Navajo Nation," she says. "Some of the surrounding areas are a lot more rural than where I grew up with some areas not having access to running water and electricity."
Along with her immediate family, Yazzie spent time with her aunts who lived in nearby towns. Despite living in different places, she remembers everyone coming together for parties and celebrations.
“We did a lot of cooking at home,” she says. “Especially cooking from scratch.”
Yazzie says she has always had a “deep love and appreciation for food." As a child, she remembers getting excited for the cooking segments on her favorite TV shows. She applied what she saw on the screen to her own experiments.
"I’ve always enjoyed thinking outside of the box and seeing how I could change up flavors or make something more unique," Yazzie says.
Fueled by her young imagination and creative spirit, she added fruits into recipes, formed doughs into cute shapes and says she made heart-shaped tortillas "all the time."
"We didn’t have a lot to do growing up, so cooking was a fun activity I did with my siblings," she says.
A family tradition
Yazzie's family members were her teachers. She fondly remembers baking bread with her mom and apple pie and doughnuts with her brother at home in Fruitland. And like many families, cooking brought Yazzie’s loved ones together.“My mom encouraged me to write down all the measurements which is a little bit untraditional, especially for Indigenous cultures,” Yazzie says. “A lot of our teachings are oral and are hardly ever written down.”
In her cookbook, Yazzie includes a version of her mom’s scratch-bread recipe. Titled “Fancy Navajo Magic Bread,” the recipe is the base for three foods: tortillas, fry bread and biscuits. Yazzie considers it a good introductory recipe to Navajo cuisine.
“I always love making that with her because, for one, I never knew what we were going to come up with at the end,” Yazzie says. “It was always a surprise.”
After high school, Yazzie studied business administration and double majored in marketing and human resources at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
"A lot of the students had never met a Native American before," she says.
Her classmates had a lot of questions about her heritage and were quick to compare Navajo culture to stereotypical Hollywood tropes, Yazzie says.
"I had to explain that Native Americans aren’t a monolith," she says.
Yazzie’s interest in cooking with Indigenous foods blossomed during her college years. Outside of her studies at Marquette, Yazzie says she started taking bread making more seriously.
"I realized I didn’t know how to make some Navajo dishes or where to get the ingredients," she says. "It was something I relied on my mom or grandma to make and something I took for granted."
Learning those recipes brought Yazzie comfort, she says, and strengthened her relationship with her mom. After completing her undergrad in 2010, she moved to Phoenix.
“It’s not too close to home, but it’s not too far either,” she says.
Yazzie says her Braised Chile Mutton Stew is a contemporary take on a traditional recipe infused with flavorful red chiles and Navajo white cornmeal.
Lauren Topor/Good Karma Photo
Creating a community and a cookbook
On Instagram, between snaps of her homemade sumac berry smoothies and blue corn mush, Yazzie shares thoughtful posts about Indigenous-owned businesses like New Mexico’s Valley Trading Post and Oso Grande Coffee Co."In the earlier days of Instagram, there weren’t a lot of Native American influencers, especially lifestyle influencers that portrayed the content I did," she says.
Her Instagram handle, @thefancynavajo, is thanks, in part, to her earliest followers.
"People would comment 'OMG you are so fancy! That’s so fancy!'," she says.
At the time in 2014, Yazzie was posting about her favorite Valley food trucks, fashion and Navajo foods with a "fancy" twist from a personal account, before scaling up to a fully-branded social media presence and lifestyle blog.
Yazzie has also made a point to make Native-led businesses accessible to readers of her cookbook.
“I have a list of Native businesses that I recommend,” she says. “People can purchase ingredients from these providers.”
When she’s shopping for Indigenous ingredients, Yazzie says she turns to Tocabe Indigenous Marketplace. The specialty grocery store was created by the founders of the Denver-based restaurant Tocabe and offers ready-made and ethically sourced Indigenous foods via its online shop. Valley-based Blue Corn Custom Designs is another recommendation of Yazzie’s.
“It’s really cool to showcase how Native communities are thriving, how we’re growing and how we’re becoming staples for our communities,” Yazzie says.
Yazzie posts many of her recipes to her blog and hopes the site is a resource for people. For example, home cooks can access recipes ranging from mini blue corn doughnuts to yellow corn salsa on the blog.
“I want them to be free for the community,” she says.
Yazzie also uses her online platforms to connect with her growing following. Questions from her following about when a cookbook was coming started flooding her DMs and comments. Creating a cookbook felt like taking the next step, she says.
"Having a cookbook is important to me because there aren’t many Native American cookbooks, especially ones that focus on modern cuisine, written by a Native American author or a Native American woman author," she says. "A lot of stories are retold by non-Natives."
But between managing her blog and navigating day-to-day life, she acknowledges it was difficult to take the time and figure out how to shape the book.
“I really had to think about what route I wanted to go,” Yazzie notes.
"Everything aligned perfectly,” she says, when in 2023 The Quarto Group, a global publishing house, reached out to her about creating a cookbook.
“If they weren’t there to give me that push, I’m not sure the cookbook would be here,” she says.
Yazzie shares her love of food on her blog, social media and in her new cookbook.
Lauren Topor/Good Karma Photo
Cooking up a book from scratch
Yazzie put the skills she learned while blogging to use in her cookbook, like photography."I fell in love with the bright and airy photography of the early lifestyle bloggers and I began learning and researching how to take photos like that," she says.
She notes that was before high-quality iPhone cameras were commonplace.
"My mother-in-law saw my interest in taking photos and she bought me my first DSLR camera," she says. "I remember it was a Canon Rebel and I felt so overwhelmed with it and I didn’t know where to begin."
Through Instagram, Yazzie connected with Jennifer Hubbell of Chandler-based Jennifer Hubbell Photography. The two became friends and Yazzie says their styles "just clicked." Like Yazzie, Hubbell is also Navajo.
"She taught me a lot about what I know about photography. She helped me to learn how to use a DSLR and really mentored me during the earlier days," she says.
A number of Hubbell's landscape photographs appear in Yazzie's cookbook.
Yazzie authored and photographed each recipe featured in her cookbook, which is an impressive accomplishment for anyone — especially, a new mother.
“My daughter was one, going on two,” she says. “I got so much done during her nap times.”
On a typical day, Yazzie says she spent her mornings shopping for ingredients that she'd put to use in her test recipes around lunchtime. After the recipes were perfected, she made time to photograph her dishes before the sun went down. At night, she edited the photos and wrote down her recipes.
"I was making at least six to eight items in one day," she says. "We had so many leftovers, but I tried to plan out the meals so we could eat throughout the week."
Yazzie says she continued the extensive routine for about four weeks.
"I can't believe I did that," she says.
Yazzie suggests serving the Braised Chile Mutton Stew with a side of savory blue corn mush or blue corn tortillas.
Quarto
Skills and stories passed down through generations
Like her own mom, Yazzie will be able to pass on her recipes to her daughter. She also hopes to share the Navajo language. Inside her cookbook, Yazzie includes her recipe names in English and Navajo.Although she says that she is not fluent in the language, she has studied Navajo for many years, including taking a beginner language class at Mesa Community College to strengthen her skills.
"Navajo can be a difficult language to learn if you don’t speak it regularly," she says. "I wish it was something my parents taught me at a younger age. Whenever I go home I ask them to teach me more of the language."
When asked what she hopes people will take away from her cookbook, Yazzie emphasizes that Navajo cuisine is much more than the “stereotypical” foods people see at big markets and powwows.
“I hope that they learn that Native or Navajo cuisine is very diverse,” she says. “It’s not just Indian tacos."
Yazzie’s favorite dish in the book is the Braised Red Chile Mutton Stew. She describes it as a contemporary take on traditional stew that’s infused with flavorful red chiles and Navajo white cornmeal. Yazzie recommends serving it with a side of fresh blue corn tortillas or savory blue corn mush.
Additionally, Yazzie notes Navajo cuisine is both local and “in tune” with the seasons — which is apparent when you page through the book. Yazzie includes tips about how to roast green chiles in the fall and shares which seasons her recipes are suited for, like the Sumac Berry Spritzer, which she says is "the perfect summer drink."
After lots of recipe testing, editing and research, the cookbook is finally on store shelves. Yazzie’s cookbook launched on Oct. 8.
“I’m really excited to share my perspective of Navajo cooking and my modern and traditional takes on Navajo cuisine,” she says.
