Padma Lakshmi's Daughter Prefers Cooking With Her Dad

Padma Lakshmi has spent years as one of the most recognizable voices in food. From judging Top Chef to hosting Taste the Nation, cooking is basically her whole world.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that when her own teenage daughter wants a cooking partner, she doesn’t always pick her famous mom.

The Reason Is Refreshingly Simple

Speaking with PEOPLE at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Lakshmi said she loves cooking with her 15-year-old daughter, Krishna. She admitted the feeling isn’t always mutual, though.

According to Lakshmi, Krishna has been pretty direct about her preference. She told her mom she’d rather cook with her father, businessman Adam Dell, because Lakshmi can be a little overbearing in the kitchen.

It’s a candid, funny admission from someone whose entire career is built on food expertise. Even the most seasoned professional cook can come across as a bit much when the student is your own kid.

What She’s Actually Trying to Teach Her

Overbearing or not, Lakshmi has a clear goal in mind for her daughter’s time in the kitchen. She wants Krishna to head off to college with a small, practical arsenal of recipes she can make on her own.

Nothing complicated, just food that makes her self-sufficient. That list includes basics like an omelette, a roast chicken, a couple of pasta sauces, curry rice, some vegetables, and a couple of ways to prepare potatoes.

It’s less about raising a prodigy chef and more about independence. Krishna should never have to depend on takeout just because she never learned the fundamentals.

A Recipe That Made It Into the Family Cookbook

The mother-daughter dynamic even made its way into Lakshmi’s new cookbook. Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond is releasing in November.

The book includes a recipe adapted from Krishna herself. Lakshmi said it fits perfectly with the book’s larger theme: how recipes shift and evolve across generations without losing what makes them worth making.

It’s a fitting detail for a cookbook centered on adaptation. Krishna’s contribution is really a small example of the same idea playing out inside Lakshmi’s own home.

A recipe doesn’t have to stay exactly the same to stay meaningful. It just has to get passed on.

Keeping It Simple at Home

Lakshmi’s approach to her own cooking at home follows a similar less-is-more philosophy. Since she eats elaborate meals constantly for work, she tries to keep things clean and simple when cooking at home.

She aims for plates that are at least half fruits and vegetables when it’s just her and Krishna. That mindset seems to extend to how she’s raising Krishna around food in general: practical over impressive, useful over flashy.

Whether Krishna ends up cooking more like her mother or her father almost doesn’t matter. Lakshmi’s real goal sounds less about technique and more about handing her daughter the tools to feed herself well, wherever she ends up.