He Cooks, She Cooks

Saffron, cardamom, honey, pistachios and pomegranate seeds mixed with yogurt? Yoplait is a long way from ever putting out this flavor. As I ate this for breakfast, I thought of how rarely I, and other Americans, eat sweets so…floral.

In the Middle East and South Asia, saffron and rosewater are common in desserts. Orange blossom and lavender are also less familiar here as they are in other countries. These ingredients, along with spices like cardamom, are so much more aromatic than anything popular in the U.S. (Mashti Malone’s Iranian ice cream shop in Los Angeles, aside.)

But if you’d like to taste something deliciously different, try this yogurt. It’s an example of harmony in flavors you might not find often.

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Friday is Norooz — the Persian New Year — and all through elementary and high school, I had this holiday off. This was because I grew up in Beverly Hills.

People outside Los Angeles have a certain image of Beverly Hills. More often than not, they envision a city of blondes. The truth is more than 20 percent of the population is Iranian. Nearly half the kids I went to school with were Persian, and most spoke Farsi at home.

When I was young, I wondered why my friends’ mothers always overcooked the bottom of the rice. My mom never had this problem. Then I realized it was completely intentional. The crispy bottom is called the tahdeeg, and it’s an Iranian delicacy. Margaret Shaida wrote in The Legendary Cuisine of Persia, “The golden tahdeeg is the ultimate proof of (the cook’s) ability to prepare perfect rice.”

I used Shaida’s four-page description of proper rice cooking as a guide, and it worked. The process has a lot of steps, but it’s only overwhelming if you’re reading it as you go and trying to do a million things at once. Like I was. My biggest fear was burning the bottom, as I’ve seen many times before, but it came out just right. The egg and yogurt mixture made the bottom rich, golden and crispy. Now that I’ve done it once, I could probably go back and do it start to finish without a recipe.

The stuffed chicken recipe from Elisabeth Rozin was great, too. (The fruit and bulgar mixture would make a tasty dish on its own.) Kat made a cucumber yogurt salad on the side, and for dessert was homemade pistachio ice cream. (Fun fact: Iran and California are the top two producers of the world’s pistachios.)

So why not celebrate the first day of spring and the Persian New Year with an Iranian-inspired meal? Both are about clean starts, so try something new this week.

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