To find Samin Nosrat, I drive northeast out of Palm Springs, past armies of wind turbines, sagging curio shops and Dollar Generals, cholla cacti and Seuss-like Joshua trees, and into what people here call the high desert. The Yucca Valley in Southern California is the kind of place you go if you don’t want to be bothered by, say, strangers hugging you in grocery stores, screaming your name out car windows, inviting you on dates with them and their girlfriends, or asking to get coffee so they can “pick your brain.”
“People never used to look at me twice,” Nosrat says, sitting on an overstuffed, over-pillowed couch in the bungalow she’s rented for the month. “That was my superpower: When I met someone, I could decide whether to care about them…
