We're honoring Aileen Suzara as part of Healthyish Superpowered, a new kind of dinner party celebrating women around the country who are redefining wellness. Join Suzara, the Healthyish team, and our partner Caviar at Cala in San Francisco on March 27th, or see when we'll be in a city near you.

When I step into her Berkeley, California apartment on a brisk February morning, Aileen Suzara greets me with a hug. We sit at a sunlit table, a bowl of Cara Cara orange slices already waiting for me to snack on before we start cooking lunch. Since I’ve interviewed her before, I joke that she’s probably sick of me by now. “Oh my gosh! Not at all,” she says. “You must be sick of me.” She asks how I’m doing, how my writing is going. I feel like I did as a kid catching up with my sister over an after-school snack, the weight of the day melting away.

Suzara, 33, brings that same warmth and hominess to her work helping Filipino-Americans reconnect with healing foods from their heritage. Her food business, Sariwa (Tagalog for “fresh”), serves healthy, vegetable-based Filipino dishes beyond the fried, meaty fare more familiar to American palates.

Cooking is a major form of self-care for Suzara. Although it might entail preparing a lavish meal, “other times, I just want to put something in my belly and feel like the dish is giving me a hug,” she says. She traces her earliest memory of lugaw—the dish we plan to cook together, a rice porridge similar to congee—to her mother, who made it for her when she was 11 to soothe a winter cold. It’s an easy-to-make comfort dish that allows for ample freedom in ingredients.

As I get to work peeling a claw of ginger, Suzara chops leeks, scallions, and garlic. “I’m hardcore with ginger and garlic,” she says. “When a recipe calls for two cloves of garlic, I’m like, why not two heads?”

If she’s not cooking, self-care for Suzara simply means slowing down and “being extravagant about time.” Growing up in Waimea, Hawaii, she relished afternoons that stretched aimlessly, sharing food and stories with friends and family. “Empty time isn’t really empty, though,” she says. “It allows time to reconnect with our thoughts, our bodies, [and it] allows our minds to rest.”

Here in Berkeley, “empty time” might mean cozying up with a fantasy novel, preferably one with a female protagonist. (One of her favorites is Monica Furlong’s Juniper, about a Celtic princess who learns herbalism and the healing arts.) “These stories are all about restoring the natural balance,” she says, “versus male-centered narratives, where it’s like, ‘Let’s destroy it!’”

Suzara turns to nature to step outside herself, going on hikes and occasionally driving two hours north to Yuba River. As someone who grew up near the ocean, and whose family hails from coastal provinces in the Philippines, Suzara admits that a part of herself “is missing or dormant when I’m away from water.” Her parents immigrated to Buffalo, New York and lived in eight different states before finally settling in Hawaii in the late 1990s. They moved back to the Philippines a little over a decade ago.