[1][2][3][4] Her family fled the country in 1991 during the Somali Civil War when Hassan was four years old, going to a United Nations refugee camp in Mombasa, Kenya.
[5][8] She moved to Brooklyn to pursue modeling but soon started creating Somali sauces and chutneys using her mother's recipes, which she'd practiced while visiting Oslo for her first reunion with her family in fifteen years, with a goal of selling them.
[5] In 2017 Hassan met Julia Turshen, with whom she co-authored the 2020 cookbook In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean, which won the 2022 James Beard award for best international cookbook.
[5][1] Multiple publishers rejected the book, and only one, Ten Speed Press, entered negotiations.
[2] The book focuses on foods from African countries that border the Indian Ocean (Comoros, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Somalia, South Africa, and Tanzania) and were important in the spice trade; the authors collected recipes from "bibis", the Swahili word for grandmothers,[6][2] and the book was photographed by Nairobi-based Somali Khadija Farah.