I love red beans, and usually have them in a stew of greens that Persians eat over rice called Ghormeh Sabzi.
But the stew takes a long time and tonight I realized I could make a healthier version _ vegan and to be eaten alone, without rice. So here's this evening's cooking invention, which I will certainly make many more times.
Persian-inspired beans, with fenugreek and onions.
Ingredients:
1 yellow onion, sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp limoo amani, crushed (a Persian dried lime found in Middle Eastern groceries. You can substitute with juice of 1 lime)
1/2 cup fenugreek leaves, steeped in hot water for 5 minutes and drained (I buy these in bulk at the Indian grocer)
1 lemon, juiced
1 cup cooked yellow split peas
2 cans red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1. Brown onions in olive oil. Salt generously.
2. Add garlic, coriander, cumin, limoo amani, fenugreek. Cook and stir about 5 minutes, until fenugreek is lightly browned and spices are fragrant.
3. Add 1 cup water to deglaze pot. Bring to boil. Add split peas and kidney beans. Add juice of one lemon. Add water to cover beans
4. Simmer 30 minutes. Mush some of the beans as you occasionally stir if the sauce needs to thicken.
5. Garnish. This would be delicious topped with garlic chips or a little garlic-infused olive oil. Other possible garnishes: carmelized onions, lemon juice, chopped parsley, olive oil, parmesan... all of the above if you're making a meal of it.
Showing posts with label Iranian-American. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iranian-American. Show all posts
Friday, May 18, 2012
Sunday, February 6, 2011
When I was 11, we took my first trip to Iran that I wasn't in diapers for. Customs officials around the world met my families deepest, darkest food fantasies while rifling through our luggage in search of contraband.
It was a long flight to Germany, then to Iran. We flew Luftahnsa, and I remember feeling cold for the whole flight, and that my mother was furious that we were seated one row ahead of the smoking section. I also remember dutifully eating the hard, dark brown bread with strange cheese they served in-flight because my mom told us that this was the sort of food her father had eaten in Germany, where he was educated.
Because each passenger was allowed two suitcases, my mother, me and my younger sister each lugged two massive suitcases to Tehran. That was the first flight I'd ever been on where you got off the plane and stood on the tarmac _ I had only experienced travel in the cool confines of American terminals. Ever the anxious child, as we stood in the middle of the night on a runway that smelled of fuel, I kept whipping my head around, certain that we were standing in the takeoff path of a zooming jet. We rode a very quiet bus in to the terminal, where everyone seemed anxious for what lay ahead of us: customs. After we managed to get our hulking suitcases onto carts and get in line, we watched as bored, sweaty customs officials rifled through the suitcases of the people ahead of us under unforgiving fluorescent lights. Everyone looked so wan and tired. There was a large sign greeting arrivals at Mehrabad Airport in those days, with Ayatollah Khomeini's beatific-seeming visage and the words Death to America on it. I felt offended but kept this to myself _ after years of playing the de facto (and sometimes unintelligible) translator to the numerous newscasts we watched in my home, I knew this was a common refrain.
Customs officials were flipping through books, asking if travelers intended to resell the 8 pairs of Levis in their suitcases that still had tags on. Many terse words seemed to be exchanged and I remember assuming the travelers' innocence and pitying their lack of foresight -- we had snipped tags from all the new clothes we'd brought as presents for our family, careful only to leave the small plastic tag-holders so that they would know they were not receiving hand-me-downs.
Our turn came. It wasn't long before our customs official became quite amused with our suitcase. He picked up the jar of peanut butter -- Jif, because my mother is quite choosy (and because she wanted to fatten up my cousin who was a picky eater). Laughing, he showed it to other customs officials. He picked up the salami, beef jerky and other meat products my uncle had come to miss in Iran, after spending his college years in the States. There was more laughter. I hoped they wouldn't see the pièce de résistance: in my mother's carry-on was a cold Big Mac, a food that I'd never eaten as an American citizen, but her brother had fond memories of. The customs official joked that Iran had food and asked if we were afraid of starving. My mom said no, playing nice. He then asked if we'd been back since the Revolution. My mother said we hadn't, and it was my first trip. He took pity on us, or deemed us to be the harmless weirdos we are, and let us through without further scrutiny. I breathed a sigh of relief that my most valued possession, the Donkey Kong handheld game in my backpack, had survived the trip without being confiscated.
When we came back to the States, we went through customs in Los Angeles. Again, we lugged all sorts of foods that are hard to explain and smelled a little funny to the table in front of a bored customs official. He was a tall white man, a little sweaty, a little tired, wearing a variety of uncomfortable things: a tightly tied necktie, a belt that must have dug into the underside of his considerable gut, and plastic gloves in the dog days of August in a windowless corner of an airport basement in Los Angeles.
"Tokhmeh? Pesteh? Badoom?" he asked, in accented Farsi. My mom, my sister and I giggled at this big white man asking us if we were smuggling in toasted seeds, pistachios or almonds into the country _ which did not amuse him. So as not to undermine his sense of authority, my mom dutifully showed him everything in our suitcase, trying to explain what things were.
"What's this?" he asked, raising a small mass of piroshkies wrapped in many layers of plastic. Knowing me, I'm fairly certain my mouth watered involuntarily at that moment, as it does now remembering it.
"Piroshki," I chirped, feeling very protective of one of my favorite foods. "It's like a jelly donut, but with custard or cooked ground beef in it," I said, underselling it a bit. My mom had brought a bag home for my dad _ they've been sweethearts since they were 15, and on their dates they would often go to a special vendor to get their piroshkis. I breathed a sigh of relief when he let us through.
My parents recently returned from Iran, bringing back a bunch of food souvenirs once more, including two favorites. Iranians eat lots of seeds and nuts, and one of my family's favorite snack foods (sold in movie theaters and the like) is berenjak, a mix of puffed basmati rice, sesame seeds and shahdooneh, which are hemp seeds or pot seeds, I'm not sure which. The seeds are toasted and salted, and the mix seems tart with lemon juice to me, but I'm not sure how it's prepared. To eat it, you scoop some into a saucer and dip your tongue into it, letting the tiny bits stick to your tongue. It's not the most attractive thing to watch, but the crunch and snap of the seeds and rice are endlessly satisfying.
Berenjak: from top to bottom, sesame seeds, puffed rice, shahdooneh.
Something we've only discovered in recent years are the delicious crackers of Iran. Again, it's the same ingredients in a sense: finely milled rice flour, sesame and shahdooneh.
From left to right: sweet, cardamom-scented morning crackers with sesame; savory shahdooneh crackers and sesame crackers.
It was a long flight to Germany, then to Iran. We flew Luftahnsa, and I remember feeling cold for the whole flight, and that my mother was furious that we were seated one row ahead of the smoking section. I also remember dutifully eating the hard, dark brown bread with strange cheese they served in-flight because my mom told us that this was the sort of food her father had eaten in Germany, where he was educated.
Because each passenger was allowed two suitcases, my mother, me and my younger sister each lugged two massive suitcases to Tehran. That was the first flight I'd ever been on where you got off the plane and stood on the tarmac _ I had only experienced travel in the cool confines of American terminals. Ever the anxious child, as we stood in the middle of the night on a runway that smelled of fuel, I kept whipping my head around, certain that we were standing in the takeoff path of a zooming jet. We rode a very quiet bus in to the terminal, where everyone seemed anxious for what lay ahead of us: customs. After we managed to get our hulking suitcases onto carts and get in line, we watched as bored, sweaty customs officials rifled through the suitcases of the people ahead of us under unforgiving fluorescent lights. Everyone looked so wan and tired. There was a large sign greeting arrivals at Mehrabad Airport in those days, with Ayatollah Khomeini's beatific-seeming visage and the words Death to America on it. I felt offended but kept this to myself _ after years of playing the de facto (and sometimes unintelligible) translator to the numerous newscasts we watched in my home, I knew this was a common refrain.
Customs officials were flipping through books, asking if travelers intended to resell the 8 pairs of Levis in their suitcases that still had tags on. Many terse words seemed to be exchanged and I remember assuming the travelers' innocence and pitying their lack of foresight -- we had snipped tags from all the new clothes we'd brought as presents for our family, careful only to leave the small plastic tag-holders so that they would know they were not receiving hand-me-downs.
Our turn came. It wasn't long before our customs official became quite amused with our suitcase. He picked up the jar of peanut butter -- Jif, because my mother is quite choosy (and because she wanted to fatten up my cousin who was a picky eater). Laughing, he showed it to other customs officials. He picked up the salami, beef jerky and other meat products my uncle had come to miss in Iran, after spending his college years in the States. There was more laughter. I hoped they wouldn't see the pièce de résistance: in my mother's carry-on was a cold Big Mac, a food that I'd never eaten as an American citizen, but her brother had fond memories of. The customs official joked that Iran had food and asked if we were afraid of starving. My mom said no, playing nice. He then asked if we'd been back since the Revolution. My mother said we hadn't, and it was my first trip. He took pity on us, or deemed us to be the harmless weirdos we are, and let us through without further scrutiny. I breathed a sigh of relief that my most valued possession, the Donkey Kong handheld game in my backpack, had survived the trip without being confiscated.
When we came back to the States, we went through customs in Los Angeles. Again, we lugged all sorts of foods that are hard to explain and smelled a little funny to the table in front of a bored customs official. He was a tall white man, a little sweaty, a little tired, wearing a variety of uncomfortable things: a tightly tied necktie, a belt that must have dug into the underside of his considerable gut, and plastic gloves in the dog days of August in a windowless corner of an airport basement in Los Angeles.
"Tokhmeh? Pesteh? Badoom?" he asked, in accented Farsi. My mom, my sister and I giggled at this big white man asking us if we were smuggling in toasted seeds, pistachios or almonds into the country _ which did not amuse him. So as not to undermine his sense of authority, my mom dutifully showed him everything in our suitcase, trying to explain what things were.
"What's this?" he asked, raising a small mass of piroshkies wrapped in many layers of plastic. Knowing me, I'm fairly certain my mouth watered involuntarily at that moment, as it does now remembering it.
"Piroshki," I chirped, feeling very protective of one of my favorite foods. "It's like a jelly donut, but with custard or cooked ground beef in it," I said, underselling it a bit. My mom had brought a bag home for my dad _ they've been sweethearts since they were 15, and on their dates they would often go to a special vendor to get their piroshkis. I breathed a sigh of relief when he let us through.
My parents recently returned from Iran, bringing back a bunch of food souvenirs once more, including two favorites. Iranians eat lots of seeds and nuts, and one of my family's favorite snack foods (sold in movie theaters and the like) is berenjak, a mix of puffed basmati rice, sesame seeds and shahdooneh, which are hemp seeds or pot seeds, I'm not sure which. The seeds are toasted and salted, and the mix seems tart with lemon juice to me, but I'm not sure how it's prepared. To eat it, you scoop some into a saucer and dip your tongue into it, letting the tiny bits stick to your tongue. It's not the most attractive thing to watch, but the crunch and snap of the seeds and rice are endlessly satisfying.
Berenjak: from top to bottom, sesame seeds, puffed rice, shahdooneh.Something we've only discovered in recent years are the delicious crackers of Iran. Again, it's the same ingredients in a sense: finely milled rice flour, sesame and shahdooneh.
From left to right: sweet, cardamom-scented morning crackers with sesame; savory shahdooneh crackers and sesame crackers.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Growing up bilingual means knowing some things are so hard to translate that they will never be communicated properly, and sometimes the more effort you put into an explanation, the less understood it ends up being.
This feels particularly true in the kitchen. The hardest thing to explain to my adventurous food-loving friends who have asked me how to cook Iranian dishes is the concept of jah oftadan, which means "falling into place." You just have to keep cooking the food until it hits the right flavors, long after individual elements are thoroughly cooked enough to be edible. Though cookbooks will tell you that it's an hour or two for flavors to fall into place, they lie to sate marketers and publishers. Few Iranian dishes can be pulled off without 4 to 5 hours of straight simmering. On rare occasions, I've overdone it and overcooked dinner. But rarely.
If it wasn't clear before, it should be apparent now why European and American cooking is conceptually refreshing to me. The appeal lies in their embrace of the concept of overcooking as a flaw -- steaks are served medium rare, pasta is served al dente and the French like to cook a la minute for fresh fare, fast.
Maybe part of the intrigue is the mouth-wateringly long wait it takes for foods stew in their own juices, allowing for unlikely marriages of flavors like cinnamon and eggplant. It's fairly normal to not see a scrap of dinner before midnight at many Iranian dinner parties. The hunger and excitement such food repression creates is immeasurable.
A facet of jah oftadan goes beyond the melding of tastes, and deals with consistency and tenderness. You never want a soup or stew to be ab o doon jodah, which literally means "water and bits separate." When I think of this phrase, I can almost see my mother in my head, frowning while spooning at a bowl of Campbell's style chicken soup, allowing the broth to drip and splash before bits of carrots plopp into the bowl. You want herbs to have cooked into melting smoothness, meat that requires little chewing and beans and vegetables that are mushable with a spoon.
I tried to capture the difference with pictures of an ash e joh or barley soup that I made this week. It's made by browning stew beef with onions and turmeric. Add various beans (dried kidney, white, lentils, split yellow peas and garbanzos in this pot) and water to the pot, boil an hour. Add barley, boil an hour. Add a huge mess of herbs and spinach, boil for an extremely long time until everything is perfect.
Ab o doon jodah. See how you could fill a spoon with a wad of very green herbs or a hunk of beef and a bit of water, never getting everything the soup has to offer in one great bite? No good.
Ja oftadeh. See how the greens have boiled down into an olive-colored base for the broth and the soup is dense enough to stand up to its fried medley of garnishes (onions, garlic and mint)?
Perfect. I now have a massive pot of this in the fridge and a bunch of it frozen for cold days... assuming we get any more of those this winter. Oh, California.
Equally perfect but much less labor intensive is this black cherry Jell-O, morello cherries and whipped cream dessert parfait.
You are so beautiful... to me.
This feels particularly true in the kitchen. The hardest thing to explain to my adventurous food-loving friends who have asked me how to cook Iranian dishes is the concept of jah oftadan, which means "falling into place." You just have to keep cooking the food until it hits the right flavors, long after individual elements are thoroughly cooked enough to be edible. Though cookbooks will tell you that it's an hour or two for flavors to fall into place, they lie to sate marketers and publishers. Few Iranian dishes can be pulled off without 4 to 5 hours of straight simmering. On rare occasions, I've overdone it and overcooked dinner. But rarely.
If it wasn't clear before, it should be apparent now why European and American cooking is conceptually refreshing to me. The appeal lies in their embrace of the concept of overcooking as a flaw -- steaks are served medium rare, pasta is served al dente and the French like to cook a la minute for fresh fare, fast.
Maybe part of the intrigue is the mouth-wateringly long wait it takes for foods stew in their own juices, allowing for unlikely marriages of flavors like cinnamon and eggplant. It's fairly normal to not see a scrap of dinner before midnight at many Iranian dinner parties. The hunger and excitement such food repression creates is immeasurable.
A facet of jah oftadan goes beyond the melding of tastes, and deals with consistency and tenderness. You never want a soup or stew to be ab o doon jodah, which literally means "water and bits separate." When I think of this phrase, I can almost see my mother in my head, frowning while spooning at a bowl of Campbell's style chicken soup, allowing the broth to drip and splash before bits of carrots plopp into the bowl. You want herbs to have cooked into melting smoothness, meat that requires little chewing and beans and vegetables that are mushable with a spoon.
I tried to capture the difference with pictures of an ash e joh or barley soup that I made this week. It's made by browning stew beef with onions and turmeric. Add various beans (dried kidney, white, lentils, split yellow peas and garbanzos in this pot) and water to the pot, boil an hour. Add barley, boil an hour. Add a huge mess of herbs and spinach, boil for an extremely long time until everything is perfect.
Ab o doon jodah. See how you could fill a spoon with a wad of very green herbs or a hunk of beef and a bit of water, never getting everything the soup has to offer in one great bite? No good.
Ja oftadeh. See how the greens have boiled down into an olive-colored base for the broth and the soup is dense enough to stand up to its fried medley of garnishes (onions, garlic and mint)?Perfect. I now have a massive pot of this in the fridge and a bunch of it frozen for cold days... assuming we get any more of those this winter. Oh, California.
Equally perfect but much less labor intensive is this black cherry Jell-O, morello cherries and whipped cream dessert parfait.
You are so beautiful... to me.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
If you've ever been to Costco, you know what this is.An admission: the quarter-pound Hebrew National all-beef hot dog is one of the more cherished delicacies of my upbringing. Let's be clear: it's a boiled meat product in a smushy white bun, typically loaded up with sodium-rich condiments. Even if this thing is blessed by all the appropriate religious officials, it just can't be healthy. It is 360 delicious calories of Meat.
Oh, how I love it. It was the reward for a successful trip to Costco (and before it was called that, Price Club). Oddly, as an adult, it reminds me of my grandfather, may he rest in peace. My father's father was a military man, very disciplined but very sweet. When I was in the third or fourth grade, he came to live with us for a time. Every day, he would do morning calisthenics in his bedroom, counting his exercises out loud. Like clockwork, he made his bed, combed his silver hair and shaved his face using a little brush and a little bowl of lather. Sometimes, he'd let me work the brush. He could recite hundreds of poems, and would sit for hours during the day, reading and writing in journals. He would tell me stories from Shahnameh, though I don't remember them; I remember the sharp smell of his French cologne and the way he'd play with his voice to entertain me, and giggle at his own silliness. He enjoyed a quiet, rigorous life _ and I admired him a lot.
His diet was unadventurous. Every day, he would eat cornflakes for breakfast, with a spoon of sugar sprinkled carefully on top. For lunch, he would have one Costco hot dog plain, with a fork and knife. No bun, rarely a smattering of ketchup. And for dinner, every night, if he could get it, he would eat baghali polo ba maycheh, which is a rice pilaf with dill and lima beans, paired with a lamb shank stewed in onions, turmeric and saffron. Every once in a while, after a meal, he would indulge: one scoop of vanilla ice cream. Though he would protest if you gave him a big scoop, he would quietly run his spoon along the bottom of the bowl to catch every last bit.
No matter how many times I tried to turn him on to the things I loved eating at the time, he would express smiling disinterest _ which, in hindsight, was the correct thing to do when dealing with a precocious child's palate (rainbow sherbet, anyone?). I used to fear he wouldn't like America or staying with us if I couldn't get him to like junior Western cheeseburgers from Carl's Jr. or all-you-can-eat salad bars. But really, he was like so many of the parents of his generation: torn between homeland and his children who had left it for far-flung places. He wasn't going to while away the end of his life in an unfamiliar land for seasoned criss-cut fries, despite my youthful conviction that they made life -- anywhere -- worth living.
Nowadays, I take my dog with a bun and ketchup. In my grown-up defense, the bun is one of those fake white buns that's secretly whole wheat but they somehow mill it to look, taste and feel like white bread (yeah, I don't really buy it either) and the ketchup is organic and from Trader Joe's. Thank god these kosher delights come in packs of 4 and no more. Though, now I have four spare hot dog buns and don't know what to do with them.
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