 I'm an executive chef at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. My name is Frida Karan, I'm a military chef. Today I would like to welcome you into my home and show you what I do in my kitchen. So I don't normally just cook at work, I cook at home for my friends and family and also my boyfriend. Wait, much better, let's get to work. All right, so fastly fast, we have to go to the store and get some vegetables for the dish that I'm gonna make and then we'll go from there. Well, so my cooking passion actually came and started with my grandmother. When I was little back in Kenya, I used to always go out and play with the rest of the kids and my grandma would always tell me, come on, you need to learn how to cook that way you can be able to cook, not just for yourself, but whenever you have a family you can be able to cook for them. But then again, when I went to college, much later that's when I realized how big food is for not just family, but for everyone. Cooking, really to be honest, whenever I cook something and I put it on a plate and present to someone, that instant gratification they get from just looking and eating with their eyes is what drives me. There's a kind of like an itch mark across the street which has literally almost everything that I normally buy back home. So yeah, so I go there often. Because for the most part, whenever I cook, it's really, I'm inspired by the ingredients. It's not like I just come up with the stuff, just to come up with them because most of the times the food we make is out of what's available. So at times I would come here and just walk around and be like, well, let me just make this because this looks good, this looks better. Right over here, I love this because it's healthy. I try to keep up with the go for green that the Navy has for food service. So I eat mostly vegetables and nice and healthy. This looks a little beat up a little bit, but when you pick them, you can see it's firm, it's nice, get a couple of petals out of this. It's not as bad. Whoops. This one, I'll just grab one of these. So some of the, sometimes whenever I cook, I also think of colors because most of the times when you're cooking, especially for me, it's all about people eating with their eyes first. So when I'm cooking, I'm thinking, oh, what colors can I incorporate so that when this person sees the plate, it's vibrant, it's well-balanced in terms of vegetables, starch and the protein, but for the most part, it is also tasty and you know, good looking. Let me grab a bag. All right, now we got all these ingredients. Now it's time to go make that awesome meal. It is one of my favorite meat actually because just because it brings memories from back home. And for the most part, we do this one dish, it's called Nyama Choma with Ugali and Kachumbari, my favorite. So today we're gonna do our crusted lamb with pureed butternut squash, vegetables, and then we'll go from there. I'm lucky today because this lamb, it's already frenched. You can see nice and clean bones, I love it. I like to cook very light in seasoning and everything. That way it stays, food tastes as it's supposed to taste, natural, rather than putting too much seasoning and just changing it from what it's supposed to be to tasting like processed or something like that. That's what I was talking about. When it comes to nice falling, make sure you have positive control. Kachumbari lamb is so good to work with because it actually holds its heat. It doesn't lose heat as much. Once you have the kachumbari nice and seasoned, oh man, you can do a lot of things on that. I have competed not just within United States, I've been able to compete nationally with the Royal Armed Forces because we got to not just compete, we also got to learn how the Royal Navy does their schooling because the competition is held where their school is for CSS. So I just realized that I just said, CS, America might not know what that means, but it's culinary specialist. Before they used to call them mess specialists. Couple, I think a year and a half now, I was, you know, afforded the privilege of going and participating in the show chopped. There are two crisps, but this competition means the world to me. I have to win it. For those who have seen the episode, I won, thankfully, I was praying the entire time. Don't get, I said to myself, Frida, you better not get chopped first. So I got, once I got through the first part, I was like... So this, you see how it creates a nice tear on there? That's what you want. So nobody, you would, some people would individually rub these, but today I was just going to do this. I don't want to cook at work and I also cook at home for family and friends, but the hardest part is cooking for family because they have your biggest credit. So a lot of times, whenever you're at home or even when I was on the ship, most of the times when you put a meal in front of someone, you can see the expression in their faces how happy they get, especially if the food is good. So most of the times whenever I cook is when I want to cheer someone up. So from the banana squash, we cooked our squash and now we're going to puree this. Now we have our nice lovely velvety banana squash puree. So I started cooking, I was learning how to cook when I was 10 and I'm 37 now and I'm still learning different things. So cooking is not a one day, all I figured it out. No, especially with trends changing, cooking is something that you want to learn every single day and improve your skill. We are trying every single day, I know culinary specialists in the name, they try every single day to better their skill either by going to school or even trying to get certification from American Culinary Federation. So give us a chance. This is my boyfriend Adam Harball, he's come for lunch. Baby chef, I am grateful for the opportunities that the Navy has offered me from the schooling to my career in general. For paying for my certifications, I am humble and very, very grateful and cannot wait to give back.