It's a rainy Wednesday evening, and Himanshu Suri is dicing vegetables in the kitchen as his mother wraps herself in a blanket on the couch, a news report on the presidential election murmuring from a T.V. across the room. Nestled in a quiet, picket-fenced stretch of Hicksville, Long Island—a neighborhood increasingly referred to as Nassau County’s “Little India”—the Suris’ home is a large, brick monument to East Coast suburbia. Faded family pictures hang from the walls; sneakers and tricycles crowd the front door; a freshly-mowed baseball diamond sits just a few blocks away. When the T.V.’s not tuned to CNN, the Suris watch Law & Order: SVU.

The scene feels far removed from recording sessions and world tours. But under the stage name Heems, Suri has led one of the more interesting careers in hip-hop in decades—first, as a member of the absurdist, avant-garde rap trio Das Racist, and more recently as one-half of Swet Shop Boys, a frenetic, politically-minded project featuring the actor Riz Ahmed.

Today, the 31-year-old Suri has moved back home to help care for his aging parents, but the living arrangement has also given way to a new passion: cooking. While domestic life might feel stifling to other artists, the comforts of Hicksville lit a creative fire in Suri, leading the MC to a network sitcom pilot, an offer to write a cookbook, and collaborations with some of the country’s most respected chefs.

“It might be cliché, but I really do think painting, writing, fashion, food—it’s all just different colors on a canvas,” Suri tells me, tossing some garlic and coriander into a hot pan. “It’s easy with Indian food, because the spices are really colorful. You can be like, ‘Oh, a little bit of orange, a little bit of red.’ Throw some white in there and you’re just like Jackson Pollock.”

In the kitchen, Suri operates much like he does on a track—moving on instinct, drawing inspiration from seemingly incongruous sources. “Mom, I’m gonna cook some goat!” he yells before grabbing a bag of ground meat from the refrigerator. For dinner, he plans to mix the meat with broccoli and Hakka noodles, an ingredient often used when blending Indian and Chinese cuisines. Though he was recently approached by a publisher to write a cookbook, he loathes the idea of written recipes and measuring cups, instead gleaning what he can from his Punjabi relatives.

As Suri’s musical career continues to take twists and turns, food has become an increasingly crucial component of his identity as a creative. In 2010, Das Racist performed a surreal version of their song “Ek Shaneesh” in Anthony Bourdain’s refrigerator for the No Reservations holiday special. And four years later, Suri supplied the music for the Punjab episode of Bourdain’s CNN series, Parts Unknown. On Sunday, he appeared on camera with Bourdain to help shepherd the chef through his native Queens, stopping by Yu Garden Dumpling House in Flushing for boiled pig tongue and spicy beef and tripe.

Last year, Suri also presented at the the Taste Talks Food & Drink Awards, and teamed up with L.A.’s Badmaash for a menu centered around pav bread—an Indian bun he used to create rava fry po’ boys and pork vindaloo Cuban sandwiches. He’s hoping the collaboration might one day lead to a permanent restaurant and tearoom on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

"[Heems sent me a menu] and it really blew me away,” says Nakul Mahendro, one of the owners of Badmaash, which means “badass" or “delinquent” in Hindi. “Adventurous is the wrong word, elaborate is even the wrong word, but it was written like a chef’s menu. It was very thoughtful, and you could see that this person understands flavor.”

“Indian food in America has been in a state of 911,” Mahendro adds. “Our goal is to take the idea of the ‘Indian restaurant,’ to put that on a pedestal, and to just fucking TNT the thing.”

Today, as hosts like Action Bronson and Eddie Huang lead a fresh wave of food and travel shows on T.V., it feels like Suri is positioning himself as another figure who can bring hip-hop into the kitchen in 2017. And when it comes to the tired clichés and stereotypes associated with Indian cuisine in particular, he may be another delinquent willing to light the fuse at the end of the dynamite.

As the goat continues to simmer on the stove, Suri and I discuss his philosophy on cooking, the connection between food and hip-hop, and the complicated state of Indian cuisine in America.