Chef Alana Yazzie’s new cookbook celebrates Indigenous traditions and flavors. BY LAUREN TOPOR I f you’ve scrolled through your Instagram feed lately, there’s a good chance Alana Yazzie’s colorful, food- filled posts have caught your atten- tion. Yazzie is the creator behind The Fancy Navajo, a lifestyle and food blog she started in 2014 to highlight Navajo cuisine and Indigenous businesses. Now, a decade later and with 27,000 Instagram followers and counting, Yazzie just added another achievement to her resume: cookbook author. 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 teach- ings 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 busi- ness 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 some- thing 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. 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 influ- encers, 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 ethi- cally sourced Indigenous foods via its online shop. Valley-based Blue Corn Custom Designs is another >> p 18 ‘The Modern Navajo Kitchen’ Illustration by Jared Yazzie