Iranian foods:

Monday, August 18
Well, my grandpa is writing about breads & foods. So I decide to write about some of the Iranian foods. But I won’t write about recipes cos I really don’t know anything about cooking. In my opinion cooking is an art one shall have the talent of. & I do believe that people shall not cook when they don’t want to. It makes the food taste awful! Mom used to say the mood is shown in the food & that’s really true.

Any way, Iranian foods are so different from western ones. It takes much more time to cook them & the smell is sharp. (You can smell a food Like Gormesabzi from a far distance.) They are really delicious but there are tricks to cook them correctly. & the same food may be cooked in different styles in different regions of my country.

My favorite one: of course Gormesabzi! It’s a kind of stew we eat with rice. The stew consists of herbs (including leek, French marigold & fenugreek) meat chops & kidney beans. It smells wonderful. If I had to choose just one kind of food Gormesabzi would be my choice. Tehranian Gormesabzi is green & the liquid part is somehow serrated one may say. The meat chops may contain bones too. But my dad likes the herbs to be fried until they turn blackish green & we use more beans. Our stew is more solid & meat chops doesn’t consist of bones. This is the only food we don’t cook in tehranian way.
The next stew is Geymeh. It’s a light brown stew consisted of cotyledons, small meat chops, kind of lime & of course tomato extract. Cooking it is easier & when you want to serve a lot of people it’s a good choice. I’ve never met any one who didn’t like this stew. Well, I like it but it won’t be my first choice.
Fesenjoon is the next stew. I don’t like it at all! It has nut, onion & meat balls. Though you may use meat, chicken or turkey chops instead. It’s a dark brown stew & in official ceremonies you find it as an important course. God knows I can’t eat it! So many people just love this food. You may like to have it sweetened with sugar or have it sour.

Rice is a main food here. But it is cooked in special ways, not like Indians or Far-easterners. We eat plain rice which may be called POLO or CHELO or KATE, depending on how you cook it.

There are some kind of mixed- rice. I mean they are POLOS mixed with other kind of herb, vegetables, and meats and….. BAGHALI POLO is one of them which is mixed with broad beans & served with meat chops or chicken. LOBIYA POLO is my favorite mixed food. It has string beans & small meat chops. AADAS POLO is another one I don’t like much. It has lentil; & is often served with a dressing made of small plums/raisins grinned meat & onion.

Still, there is a food I haven’t told you about! It’s KABAB! If you get in one of these Iranian restaurants you find too many kind of it! It’s, let’s say, our official food! You may call it barbeque. Yet it’s different from the ones you have over there. Try it once & you never forget the taste.

There are so many kinds of food I haven’t talked about. Like the soups, ASH, ABGOOSHT. You see, I can’t tell you all about it! But I promise if you ever wanted to come over here, I can show you how they taste!