She barely made it out of Kabul. Now she's welcoming Afghans with a familiar meal.

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Chef Zainab learned to cook traditional Afghan food from her mother in Kabul. Biny Alemayehu/Courtesy of Foodhini hide caption

Chef Zainab learned to cook traditional Afghan food from her mother in Kabul.

Zainab distinctly remembers her first meal in the U.S. — and not in a good way.

"They brought us rice, and there was a kind of meat on it, and it was thin like paper," she said, struggling to explain the concept of deli meat in Dari through an interpreter. "I didn't eat it," she added, laughing.

Now it's her job to make sure newly arriving Afghans will have better memories of their first meals.

Zainab is a chef at Foodhini, a delivery-only restaurant in Washington, D.C., that features the cooking of refugees and immigrants. As tens of thousands of Afghans begin resettling in communities across the country, Foodhini is offering "welcome meals" that are donated by customers to support newly arriving families.

On a recent morning in the restaurant's kitchen, Zainab poured crushed tomatoes into a giant pan of sizzling oil and onions. She was making a bean dish called lubya, one of many Afghan dishes she learned from her mother as a teenager in Kabul, where she often cooked for her parents and seven siblings.

Now Zainab is preparing some of those same dishes for Afghans who are resettling in the region.

"I am very happy to be able to help them," she told NPR. "I am happy that they are safe here."

That's a feeling Zainab knows well, after barely escaping from Afghanistan herself.

She left the country two years ago, along with her husband and teenage daughter. He had worked for the U.S. Army in Kabul, which made him eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa.

They left many relatives behind. And they're worried about retaliation from the Taliban, so they asked us not to use their last name.

Zainab's family settled in Maryland, just outside Washington D.C., and started building a new life. She had worked in restaurant kitchens before she left Kabul. That helped her get a job at Foodhini.

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Afghan chicken gormeh, one of the dishes Zainab prepares as part of "welcome meals" that Foodhini's customers can donate to support newly arrived Afghan families. Biny Alemayehu/Courtesy of Foodhini hide caption

Afghan chicken gormeh, one of the dishes Zainab prepares as part of "welcome meals" that Foodhini's customers can donate to support newly arrived Afghan families.

But she still misses her parents.

"I think I won't be able to see my parents again. It makes me really sad. If the Taliban rule Afghanistan, I won't be able to go there," she said.

In June, Zainab and her family decided to go back to visit her parents in Afghanistan, knowing it might be their last chance for a long time. They bought return tickets for August, but never got to use them. Their flight was cancelled when the Taliban swept into Kabul.

Zainab was stranded, along with her husband and 16-year-old daughter.

"I felt bad because my daughter was crying a lot, she wouldn't eat, she told me: It was you who brought me to Afghanistan, and now we have to stay here and the Taliban would not let me go to school. And I can't leave the house," Zainab said.

The family tried to get to the Kabul airport, but the violence and chaos outside the gates drove them back. Meanwhile, Zainab's employers and her aunt in the United States were calling everyone they could think of, trying desperately to get her family out.

Finally, Zainab heard from the U.S. Embassy. She and her family were directed to a helicopter, which flew them over the gates and into the airport, where they boarded a giant military plane along with hundreds of other Afghans fleeing the country.