Sandwiched between a kitchen counter and a mad-scientist lab of stews and sauces, Kelis is hunched over a small pyramid of yucca root, inspecting it like a jeweler would examine a diamond. She’s seven and a half months pregnant with her second son and brutally jetlagged—she’s just returned from a three-day food tour of Taipei—but she wants to make sure the yucca attains the perfect level of crispiness before it becomes her version of poutine, the Canadian french fry dish, that will accompany an oxtail stew boiling behind her. “You know in Australia they do it with kangaroo tail?” she tells Jonah Eagan, executive sous chef at New York’s Soho House, who’s helping Kelis get ready for a 60-person dinner there the following night to celebrate her new cookbook, My Life on a Plate.