Meal 101: Madagascar

The same geographic isolation that's led to the lemurs and other unique fauna and flora for which most of us know this island, also meant that even though it's not far on an absolute basis from where humankind emerged in East Africa, it wasn't settled until around 2,000 years ago. And, improbably, those settlers were Austronesian, probably from Borneo, having crossed the Indian Ocean westward in canoes — in other words, from the same ethnic core as Hawaiians and even Easter Islanders. As they did wherever they went, those Austronesians brought rice and pork with them, too.

Madagascar is so big — the fourth-largest island in the world — that before Europeans showed up, the folks living there didn't have a name for it. So there was nobody to tell Marco Polo that he really messed up when he confused the island with Mogadishu, the port city and current capital of Somalia, and then got it really wrong. So while Madagascar is indeed an exotic-sounding name, it was accidentally invented by a Venetian.

Our guest of honor was Mimi, from Madagascar, who helped us plan the meal and also help us understand what we were eating and why. We also had his wife Kirsten, their son, and Deena, Bengt, Molly, Julie, Levi Laura, Anna, Judy, Haley, and Mary — a big enough crowd that we needed two whole tables!

Vary | Rice

The basis of virtually every Malagasy meal, it’s typically served in tremendous quantities. I’m figuring its predominance is a legacy of the Austronesians. Despite its importance, I couldn’t find any description of how they cook it; Mimy said to just do the “normal” method of bringing to a boil then steaming.

Ranovola | Rice water

The water in Madagascar isn’t safe to drink, so you need to boil it. But the big pot was just used for making a bunch of rice, and it’s a pain to scrub off the bits of rice stuck to the bottom. The Malagasy solution is brilliant: just boil the water in the pot along with the stuck-on bits! The water gets a delightful toasty flavor, and the pan is a lot easier to clean.

You can drink this rice water warm or chilled; I chilled it. The flavor was indeed nice and nutty, though Mimy suggested I could have boiled it a bit longer to make the flavor even deeper.

Ravitoto sy henakisoa | Pork with cassava leaves | Recipe

Pork from the Austronesians and cassava from the African mainland (after having been originally brought from Brazil) combine to make a national dish that’s very emblematic of Madagascar’s cultural geography. I have to admit that cassava-leaf stews just aren’t my favorite, though to be fair I’ve only had them made from rock-hard chunks of frozen leaves, which can’t be ideal. That said, this was among the better I’ve had, the pork definitely adding a richness that central African preparations have tended to lack.

Tsaramaso | Beans | Recipe

Unlike several other African bean dishes I've made, which are very straightforward preparations with just a few vegetables for flavor, this one has two features that make for more flavor. The first is cooking the vegetables first and making a broth out of that, so the flavors can be absorbed throughout cooking rather than just mixed in at the end. The second is some seasoning, in the form of curry — perhaps we can thank trading ships on the Indian Ocean for that contribution. It went extra well with some fried tilapia, which probably should have been whole filets but ended up as pieces due to a bit of kitchen miscommunication. Oh well! All tasty over the requisite pile of rice.

Ro mazava | Broth | Recipe

When there's not much money or food around, a meal may consist solely of some rice supplemented by a weak broth of greens or maybe some bits of fish or meat. In my enthusiasm to incorporate a broad variety of Malagasy foods, I kinda went overboard, and made a broth of greens and fish in addition to the whole rest of the meal. Mimy said you probably wouldn't serve such a broth if you have other stuff, but all the same, it added some nice flavor to drink it warm alongside the meal.

Sakay | Hot sauce | Recipe (in French)

What a surprisingly successful condiment, especially considering I couldn't find a single recipe that gave proportions. To translate the linked recipe interpreted by what I did: equal parts by volume of garlic and black pepper (since there seems to be nowhere in the US to get the specified Voatsiperifery pepper), and a little less of bird's eye chilies (I used frozen ones from the Asian grocery). I threw in enough vinegar and oil to make a smooth texture, dashed in a bit of dried ginger and salt, and whizzed it up in the little food processor. The abundant black pepper gives it an unusual and intense dimension, and most importantly, Mimy said he loved it! We ran out, and

Mofo akondro ou koba | Steamed banana and peanut cake | Recipe

Fried desserts are a delicious treat, but really annoying for a chef who also wants to enjoy the dinner party rather than clean up the kitchen and spend time away from the guests wrangling hot oil. So, instead of the fried bananas which seem to be Madagascar's number one dessert, I went for another that can thankfully be made ahead of time: a batter of mashed bananas and rice flour spread onto banana leaves, wrapped around ground peanuts, and poached for a long time (I used the crock pot). The texture firmed up as it was supposed to, but it was pretty bit bland, and Mimy pointed out how it should be improved: put caramelized sugar in with the peanuts! Makes sense to me.

Meal 100: Luxembourg

Food from this little Grand Duchy bordering Belgium, France, and Germany is for sure Germanic, with pork and potatoes, but also with a surprisingly strong showing from fresh beans. It’s also one of the most northerly wine-growing areas in Europe — just about all of which is white — and we Noshers bring our A-game when wine is culturally appropriate. Or preserved meats.

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For a relatively simple meal from a little country, Luxembourg turned out to be a big occasion! It was our first Nosh in Brooklyn since moving nine months ago, and a nice round Meal 100 to boot. Michael and China were super-generous in hosting us in (and renting a second table for!) their ample Park Slope apartment, so we had a grand crowd of 16 for really fun evening with friends old and new. And I really enjoyed heading back up to Astoria to do the shopping.

Among the attendees were our friends Jessica, Miriam, Lisa, Kirsty, Anna, Eli, and Sarah-Doe!

Wäin | Wine

The wines of Luxembourg are similar varieties to those grown in the adjacent German Mosel and French Alsace regions: Müller-Thurgau and Auxerrois (very similar to Chardonnay) top the list, along with pinot gris and riesling. Alas, we couldn’t find any wines from the Grand Duchy, so we substituted with said neighbors. Generously.

Bouneschlupp | Green bean soup | Recipe

If schlupp isn’t an onomatopoeia for the slurping of soup, I’d be shocked!

Don’t be fooled by the simple recipe and lack of a stock, or dismayed at how long the green beans are simmered. Instead, focus on how you start by sautéing bacon in butter as an indication of this being a recipe 100% devoted to flavor.This is one rich, delightful soup, where every ingredient’s flavors shine through. Accordingly, make sure you’ve got what it calls for, particularly with smoked bacon and dried savory. Maybe you could make a good soup with unsmoked bacon or some other choice of herbs, but I doubt it’d have the particular richness of flavor we enjoyed.

Judd mat Gaardebounen | Smoked pork collar with fava beans and potatoes | Recipe

While this is given as one recipe, it’s really three dishes, all held together by a common ingredient: salty, smoky, meaty stock.

It starts with a smoked pork collar/neck, soaked for a few hours and then gently simmered with a generous assortment of the sorts of vegetables that make for a rich broth. (You could perhaps substitute another body part, but it’s gotta be smoked pork.)

That’s all it takes to make the pork; the rest is just taking that broth and using it to make the other parts really yummy. Fava (aka broad) beans trade one enrobing for another: peel-blanch-peel those notoriously well-protected beans, then smother them in a velouté made of roux, white wine, and some of that pork broth.

And the potatoes are par-boiled, skillet-fried until getting crisp, and then doused with a healthy dose of more broth which they happily absorb. (I recommend making quite a bit more potatoes than the recipe calls for, because in the worst case you end up with leftover salty-pork-broth-laden potatoes. And by worst case I think I mean best case.)

Yum! Pork so tender that it succumbs to a plastic knife, potatoes at just the right texture to be speared with a plastic fork (you’re getting the idea of what we ate with!) without falling apart, and creamy-salty sauce balanced by fresh-firm favas. Luxembourg, your national dish may be oddly specific, but you figured out a darn good thing.

Quetschentaart | Plum tart | Recipe

A quetsch is a damson plum, a tart variety best cooked into jam or pie. It’s also only available in the fall, and not exactly the sort of thing that’s popular enough to be shipped fresh from the Southern Hemisphere, so I had to get creative. One market I stopped into had both regular ripe plums (thanks, Chile!) as well as the sort of sour plums used to make those weird and wonderful Japanese preserves (who knows where they came from), so I got some of both in a vague hope that the combination would resemble a quetsch.

I’m not sure if I was successful in attempting the original with that combination, but it was tasty! China played the role of pastry chef, working together a really nice and solid crust. I think the egg in there helped. It’s an extremely simple recipe, but with a little whipped cream I think it turned out just fine. If I ever see damson plums at the market, I’m now intrigued enough to try making something with them.

Big thanks again to Michael and China for being so generous in so many ways for this special occasion, our 100th Nosh and return to New York! This feast couldn’t have happened without you.

Meal 97: Libya

After nearly four years, we've finally hit halfway! And how fitting to celebrate with a cuisine that's a synthesis of several influences. Libya is a real culinary interface between Africa and the Mediterranean: stews over a ball of pounded dough definitely evoke many of the sub-Saharan meals we've had so far, while spice-heavy preparations of lamb have the influence of the Ottoman Empire all over them. There's even a little legacy of the Italian occupation. For being a cuisine you hear very little about, it was really, really good — and little known, to the extent that I could find only one site with more than a few Libyan recipes. (Though it was a great site that provided all the recipes!)

To mark the occasion, we decided to make a bigger occasion out of it, and the stars aligned — our local Whole Foods donated the food and connected us to the Oregon Culinary Institute, which provided a beautiful space and a chef and several students to make it all happen. Huge thanks to Leora at Whole Foods, and to Tera, Chef Maxine, and all the students who chopped, stirred, and (blessedly) cleaned for fifty people. I fret that the leftovers they took home was scant compensation for so many hours of work! They're in the far back of the photo here, but they deserve to be front and center!

We passed one more milestone on this meal, crossing $25,000 in fundraising for charities addressing hunger around the world. For this one meal, we split the proceeds between Mercy Corps and Whole Planet Fountation — if you shopped at Whole Foods in March, you may still have one of those fetching purple-printed bags explaining how their microloans help families around the world.

Mseyer | Quick pickles | Recipe

Simple to throw together, just cut some veggies into matchsticks and mix with a brine with the right balance of hot peppers. It's a vibrant texture and color contrast to the rest of the meal. Or you can do as we did, and just nibble on them as an appetizer.

Bazeen | Recipes: Dough and lamb stew; tomato soup

This dish centers around a lump of dough made mostly of barley. It's one of the stranger techniques I've seen, where you dump a whole lot of flour in a little bit of salted water but don't mix it for 45 minutes. The outside of course gets wet but the inside is dry. Then you mix it all up — thankfully, a stand mixer works great, otherwise it'd be a ton of tough stirring — and amazingly it all comes together into a mass that can be made into balls. This means of preparing starch is attributed to the Berbers, but its popularity has spread.

What's far tastier, to me and apparently most of the guests, is the stew that goes on top. The primary choice was a lamb stew with spices like turmeric and fenugreek with potato chunks and a little tomato sauce to redden it up. Nothing particularly fancy or more exotic than what you can find in a supermarket, but it was well-balanced and rich, a real crowd pleaser. For a vegetarian stew, I found a lovely soup of tomato with herbs like mint and basil, and followed a hunch from another recipe and used dried fava beans — no soaking, boiled on their own, then added to the soup — which turned out amazingly well. The flavor was more delicate, as you'd imagine with fresh herbs, and surprisingly full for a vegetarian sauce. (Check out the quantities we were cooking in!)

Due to serving logistics, we only had small cup-size soup bowls, so it was essentially impossible to eat the dough with the stew on top as would be traditional. If you're making this, you'll want to make an effort to get bigger stew bowls, or better yet serve it all in an enormous platter to be eaten directly with the hands.

Note that I anguished over whether to make a shorba libiya, the oft-proclaimed national dish, but in the end I figured it's pretty similar to the lamb stew that went with the bazeen, and the bazeen's so distinctive that I just had to do it!

Makaruna imbaukha | Steamed pasta with pumpkin and raisins | Recipe

Couscous is traditionally made by steaming over the sauce with which it is to be served. But who knew you could prepare Italian-style pasta the same way? (Confession: due to issues of timing and logistics we ended up boiling the pasta the normal way, but I'd like to try it the traditional way someday!)

The sauce is also really intriguing. Not only are the base ingredients a sweet-savory blend of chickpeas, pumpkin, and raisins plus generous bay leaves, but the spices really take it over the top, with a generous dose of cinnamon, ground ginger, butter, and rosewater right before serving. I'm pretty sure nobody in the room had had pasta with quite that variety of seasonings before! The reviews were a bit mixed: some people were thrown for a loop by flavors they traditionally associate with dessert, while others found it intriguing and compelling.

Mbattan kusha | Potato and ground lamb casserole | Recipe

The more common, and certainly more distinctive, version of mbattan involves cutting a big notch out of a potato, stuffing it with seasoned meat, and deep-frying it. While that would have been fun, it would have been too complicated to pull off for serving to several dozen people at once, even in a commercial kitchen. So instead, we went with a deconstructed, oven-baked variant with layers of pre-roasted potato slices sandwiching a very ample ground-lamb filling. While this was probably the least exotic dish of the evening, it was perhaps the most popular, and rightly so: a great contrast of crunchy potato with soft meat, and a nicely balanced seasoning throughout.

Harissa | Spicy sauce | Recipe

I didn't realize, until I tried to find them, that fresh red chili peppers are only available seasonally. Nowhere in town had them! So I went to my standby Asian market up on Killingsworth for two packages of frozen Thai peppers. (This coming summer I'll make a point of freezing the best red peppers I can find!)

Finding the peppers was the second-hardest part; the hardest was making sure not to get any bit of it in my eyes! Once I accomplished those two, it was as simple as a little chopping of the ancillary ingredients, a blender, and a bit of time on the stove. I thought I'd made too much, but it turns out I underprepared, because every last bit was gone before the meal was over.

Basbousa bil tamr | Semolina cake with date filling | Recipe

The general technique for making cakes in the Middle East and the kitchens it's influenced is quite a bit foreign to my Eurocentric sensibilities. Whereas the cakes I know tend to be fluffy with the sugar baked in, these cakes are instead dense and fairly unsweet until they're doused with syrup after baking. (That's why baklava's so darn sticky.) In fact, this batter, based around semolina and coconut, was so thick that I pressed rather than pouring it into the pan. It was also a challenge to put together, since there's a layer of date paste sandwiched between two layers of that semolina-coconut dough. (Protip: try rolling out the date paste between waxed paper or saran wrap, it'd be a whole lot messy than pressing sections between your hands like I did!) The baking went fine, though the cake was positively swimming in syrup and we had to pour much of it off, so you can safely make quite a bit less than the recipe calls for.

I found it pretty tasty, but I've grown to like this type of dense, cloying treat. It went really well with the recommended qashta cream — if you can find it it'll probably be in a can with the Puck brand name, but World Foods in Portland happens to carry a fresh version that goes under a name that escapes me but is a heavenly rich, medium-tangy accompaniment.

Thanks once again to Whole Foods and everyone at Oregon Culinary Institute. This was a really special evening, a fittingly collaborative way to celebrate going halfway around the world, one feast at a time!

Meal 88: Kenya

We've already enjoyed three meals from the Horn of Africa, but it's taken us until the K's to start into East Africa proper. It looks a whole lot more like Central African, though I'm happy and relieved to report that we found it quite a bit tastier.

As with so many former colonial countries, the borders of Kenya arbitrarily threw a bunch of tribes together. Accordingly, there's not exactly a national cuisine as such, but there are a few dishes that are extremely common throughout the country. So we made those collards and corn mush dishes, and rounded out the meal with dishes chosen from around the counties that stretch from the sea to Africa's highest mountain.

After our small trial run for Kazakhstan, we went big for this meal, taking advantage of our new, large dining room to seat twelve around two tables. Our guests were Hannah, Emily, Frank, Don, Chelsea, Sebastian, Craig, Laura, Kaely, and Brett. The first four arrived a half hour early, due to an error in my email, but they proved super helpful in the kitchen, as I'd once again misestimated the prep time in the dishes and was relieved to have a small army of choppers, stirrers, and washers appear! Thanks, folks!

And extra-special thanks to my buddy Walter, who lived in Kenya for several years, and gave me some excellent and very useful advice on what to serve. I love it when someone can distill the essence of a country's foodways and the culture around it — I still do plenty of research to support and understand, but the guidance and structure is invaluable.

Dawa | Vodka and lime with honey swizzle | Recipe

Dawa is the Swahili word for medicine. In this case, it's got the spoonful of sugar built right in, as this drink is essentially a caipiroska (vodka-lime-sugar) taken to the next level with a swizzle-stick dipped in honey. It's tart, it's sweet, it's boozy. And it's in my hand in the above photo!

Ugali | Cornmeal porridge | Recipe

Just about all of sub-Saharan Africa has some sort of mush as the bedrock of a meal. Kenya's no different. I read in a few places that a meal is considered incomplete without this simple mix of cornmeal and water, mixed so thick that you can stand a spoon in it, and then tear off clumps with your hand to use as a vessel for scooping whatever else is on the plate.

Sukuma wiki | Collard greens | Recipe

If you're the average Kenyan on an average day, that other thing on your plate is probably the humble, tasty, nutritious collard greens, simmered for a long time with maybe some onions, tomato, and a bouillon cube. The name means "to stretch the week," as in, it's the food you can afford to eat when your money's running out before you're next paid.

I was afraid I'd find it pretty bland, given that it wouldn't have the benefit of ham or bacon as done in Southern cooking. Maybe it's because this was some super fresh (and enormous! the leaves were like two feet long!) farmers-market collards, or maybe it's really that easy to bring good flavor with a few hours of simmering, or maybe the MSG in the bouillon saved the day. Whatever the reason, the greens were tasty and popular.

Nyama choma | Grilled goat

Some cultures, such as Chinese, bring romance and storytelling to the names of their dishes. So too with parts of Africa: Cameroon has a dish Poulet D-G, standing for directeur général, since the dish is considered so fancy and tasty it's fit for the boss. Not so much with nyama choma, which literally means "burn the meat." To be fair, that's pretty much all you do: once the meat's on the skewers, all you do is slather it with warm salted water every few minutes while letting the flames sear the outside and seal the tasty juices on the inside.

The meat in question here is goat. Several months ago, someone who I wish I could remember so I could give them the credit said, "Goat is like soccer: popular in most of the world, but not the U.S." Fortunately, it's not too hard to find in Portland. I biked in the rain to a Somali market up on Killingsworth, which offered me a choice of leg or shoulder — and we agreed that the latter is the better choice for kabobs. $5/pound including cutting into kabob size. In Kenya, the sale price would have also included free grilling with a place to sit in the back!

But who cares about what it's called or where I got it. The suckers were scrumptious, embarrassingly so given how little I had to do in terms of cheffing to get them on the table. I'm certainly doing this one again on a warm weeknight.

Kachumbari | Tomato "salsa" | Recipe

Mexican pico de gallo is a great foil for the rich meat on a taco. The East Africans pair their grilled meats with almost exactly the same condiment — fresh tomatoes, onions, cilantro, lime, chili — but it came to them via a completely independent and unlikely source: the English! Just as, in the Egypt nosh, we saw how they introduced a rice-and-lentil dish from India that transformed into the national food, they also brought an onion-and-tomato salad that became ubiquitous on the other side of the Indian Ocean. No point in reviewing: this really was exactly the same as how I'd make a pico de gallo.

Mchuzi wa samaki | Swahili fish curry | Recipe

Whereas the grilled goat was the essence of simplicity, likely borne of the necessity of a nomadic lifestyle, this coastal curry shows off what you can do when you're in a tropical setting on the sea, with both the fish and the trading it entails. It gets its name from the coastal Swahili people, whose Kiswahili language has become the common language of much of East Africa. The dish was quite tasty, with a double-dose of turmeric imparting a pleasing color and a haunting flavor that brought zing to an otherwise simply flavored meal.

Muthokoi | Cracked corn and pigeon pea stew | Recipe

This dish of cracked corn and pigeon peas takes us back inland to the Akamba tribe of Eastern Kenya, and we're back to simple, earthy foods. I wasn't planning on making it, but at Mama Pauline's African Market, I got the two ingredients on a hunch that I'd find something to make with them. As you'd guess, this was a hearty and filling dish, with the flavor again coming from store-bought seasoning, a specific brand name called Royco. It's not even listed in the ingredients, and it's even written in lower-case in the recipe, that's how common the spice blend is. (Should you want to make this dish, you could use a bouillon cube, or look up "homemade royco" to find several variants. I can't remember which I used!)

Tea and cake

Walter, my buddy who'd lived several years in Kenya, gave me all sorts of specific and useful advice on the other dishes. But what he said about dessert cracked me up: "You MUST serve Bad Cake. It's effectively the national dish and national pastime. Kenyans love cake more than any people I've ever known, and they make cake worse than any people I've ever known also." This proved quite a challenge: how to make a cake that'd be intentionally bad? And bad in what way? Well, since I had a few gluten-free folks coming, I took advantage of the opportunity, and simply made a gluten-free yellow cake. Maybe it wasn't bad-to-Walter's-taste in the way Kenyans do it, but it definitely was, well, a gluten-free cake. To make the cake more Kenyan, I decorated it like the flag, which was easier and more fun than I expected.

A surprisingly nice start to East Africa, let's see how things go as we explore farther down the coast.

Meal 79: Iran

We say that with a Nosh we aim to cook a meal appropriate for a special moment or celebration, so it's great fortune when the calendar aligns with a festival — and even greater when it's the biggest of the year in the country. Persians have been celebrating Nowruz, the festival of the spring equinox, for millennia, and specific foods play a central (and delicious!) part of the rituals. Nowruz felt to me somewhere between Passover and Thanksgiving, a holiday tightly linked to many specific foods with imbued meaning. Helping us through this ancient tradition was Sophia. She brought many of the elements of the haft seen, the traditional elements; helped cook some of the dishes; and provided moral support by insisting that Iranians are very inventive so every little mistake or forgotten item wasn't a big deal and could be creatively substituted. We also got useful menu-planning help from Arya. Thanks to you both — and to everyone who pitched in to help serve, clean, and otherwise help out.

As with the India meal, we noshed at a rented space, so we could accommodate twenty people, including Laura's dad, Lyall! I must say this one went more smoothly than India, mostly because I learned the lesson to not cook too many dishes at once.

I should also note that I broke with my habit of using recipes found online. Everything I cooked is from Najmieh Batmanglij's Food of Life, which offers not only clear and tasty recipes, but also history, culture, and even fables to bring fuller context to the meal. Where possible I've linked to either the exact recipe I used, or found something similar.

Sofreh haft seen | Display of the seven "S's"

The next best thing to the way Sophia explained the arrangement is from Wikipedia:

1. Sabzeh - (Persian: سبزه‎)-wheat, barley, mung bean or lentil sprouts growing in a dish - symbolizing rebirth
2. Samanu - (Persian: سمنو‎)-sweet pudding made from wheat germ - symbolizing affluence
3. Senjed - (Persian: سنجد‎)-dried oleaster Wild Olive fruit - symbolizing love
4. Sir - (Persian: سیر‎)- garlic - symbolizing medicine
5. Sib - (Persian: سیب‎)- apples - symbolizing beauty and health
6. Somāq - (Persian: سماق‎)sumac fruit - symbolizing (the color of) sunrise
7. Serkeh - (Persian: سرکه‎) - vinegar - symbolizing old-age and patience [we didn't have any so we used wine!]

Moreso than a seder plate, there are many popular traditions of extra items to add to the core. The variation I can think of, and the only one the Wikipedia page on the seder plate lists, is an orange. In fact, one of the haft seen variations involved an orange — but floating in a bowl of water, representing the Earth in the universe. (I guess Zoroastrians didn't believe the Earth was flat?) Another common tradition is a goldfish, representing both life and Pisces, the astrological sign whose time ends on the spring equinox and hence the end of the year that Nowruz begins. According to Sophia, you'll see a goldfish in many Persian households in spring and summer, as a houseguest that arrived on Nowruz. Since neither she nor I could commit to a goldfish, we didn't get one.

Persian Rose cocktail

Alcohol is forbidden in Iran, but the place has a long history with drinking. After all, Shiraz, that inky wine, is named after a Persian city.

This cocktail is a lovely way to build a drink around rosewater. The gin stands up to the strong aroma, the cherry liqueur adds color and roundness, and the lemon of course brings the tart. (We couldn't find sweet lemons anywhere, so we balanced with some extra lemon and also a bit more sugar.) With a rose-petal float, it was quite the classy drink Laura whipped up!

Doogh | Yogurt-mint drink | Recipe

At Kalustyans, I found an artisanal Persian strain of yogurt, "slightly tart with a light saucy consistency" as the good folks at White Mustache Yogurt say. It cost $6 for a one-cup tub (!!), but now that I know how easy it is to make my own, I turned it into a whole gallon more. (And then some! I've since made more batches with the same strain that are just as good.)

We first enjoyed this drink with the Afghan meal, but I have to say I like the Persian version better, minus cucumbers and plus seltzer, and with this silky-tart yogurt as opposed to something lumpier. I might even whip this up again in a few months when I'm seeking relief from the heat!

Nan-e barbari | Buttery flatbread | Recipe

In Iran, like so much of the world, few people bake at home, and rather let someone else deal with the toil and the heat. But I like baking bread, and other than lavash it's just about impossible to find Persian-style breads here. I particularly enjoy working with a dough that has oil in it — it's easier to work with, the goopiness is kinda fun, and of course the end flavor is rich. Since I cracked my pizza stone a while ago, I cooked the breads one at a time on a metal griddle in the oven, which definitely worked to get the bread crispy, but also ended up charring the cornmeal that accrued after several loaves and led to a bit of a smoky condition. Oh well, the bread worked great, and was a fantastic companion for the cheese.

Sabzi khordan | Cheese and herb platter

Making a fresh cheese isn't quite as easy as yogurt, but it's far from impossible. In fact, the hardest part was that I just didn't have enough cheesecloth, so I ended up employing several coffee filters and mugs to strain bits of the curds, finally putting everything back together once enough of the whey had strained out. I'm not sure if I've ever had a cheese made with lime juice before, and the result was delightfully tangy. (I'm having trouble finding a copy of the recipe online, but you should be able to find a substitute. Basically, farmer's cheese made with lime juice and with some nigella/kalonji thrown in.)

With this platter we see the first of many appearances of herbs in the meal, which Persians love year-round and especially for the rebirth and freshness they represent for Nowruz.

Ash-e reshteh | Legume, herb and noodle stew | Recipe

This rich yet healthy stew of beans, lentils, herbs and noodles is as indispensable a part of Nowruz as the turkey is to Thanksgiving. An abundance of fresh greens — parsley, spinach, dill, green onion — of course makes this dish representative of springtime, while the dried legumes and buttermilk (traditionally of a variety that's dried for long-term storage) acknowledge that heartier fresh fare is yet to arrive. But most symbolic is the noodles, which you eat to "symbolize the choice of paths among the many that life spreads out before us."

But enough about embedded, how does it taste? Really good. I used a rich chicken-and-lamb broth which lent a lot of depth, and made the legume base the day before, so there was a lot of concentrated flavor. Tangy yogurt (I left the dried buttermilk at home!) and fresh herbs brought zing and aroma, and the garnish of garlic, turmeric, mint and olive oil made sure the first few bites woke up the palate.

Sabzi polo va mahi | Herbed rice with fried fish | Recipe

If Ash-e reshteh is the equivalent of turkey, then this fish-and-rice dish may as well be the cranberry sauce in terms of relevance to the holiday. (Nowruz is celebrated over the course of two weeks, so there's many meals for fulfilling the traditions.)

The rice is cooked in the peculiar Persian style: basmati rice washed five times, soaked in salt-water, vigorously par-boiled in more salt-water, drained, and then formed into a pyramid on top of a crust-base, then steamed in the residual moisture for a good long while. Let's back up to that crust-base, known as a tahdig: Persians expect that the bottom of their rice will be crispy and caramelized, so it's common practice to make a layer of oil plus something to crisp up (lavash, potatoes, yogurt) at the bottom of the pan. A gracious host will give the best crispy pieces to honored guests. The sabzi polo, or herbed pilaf (polo, pilaf, same thing!), takes this concept and layers in lots of herbs plus saffron water. I accidentally put all the saffron water on the rice, rather than reserving most for the fish as the recipe says, but I rather like the way the heavily saffron'd rice turned out!

The fried fish is simply pan-fried, though optionally dusted with some intriguing flavors, such as the turmeric and cinnamon the book calls for. I went with striped bass in filets, though you could do any white-fleshed fish and having it cut into steaks is perhaps more traditional. Either way, it's a tasty dish with crispiness all around between the fish and the tahdig!

Kuku sabzi | Frittata with herbs and walnuts | Recipe

Here eggs, that incomparable symbol of the circle of life, make a bold appearance, accompanied by two other favorite Persian ingredients, walnuts and barberries. The berries, known as zereshk, are so tart you don't really want to eat them straight, but once soaked and sautéed they're ready to balance the eggs and the herbs. Those walnuts add some crunch to what we'd expect to be a thoroughly soft dish. This is also the only dish with essentially zero flour I've ever seen that uses baking powder, which indeed serves to leaven the frittata all the more.

Samanu | Sprouted wheat pudding

Unlike a Passover seder, most of the items on the haft seen spread aren't eaten, but this pudding made of sprouted wheat is the exception. Yes, it's yet another manifestation of growth and rebirth — but also transformation. Samanu takes days, and a lot of labor, to make: you need to sprout whole wheat kernels for a few days until it gets a bit sweet thanks to malting, grind them up with water, extract every little bit of flavored you can by pressing through a sieve, and then comes the really tedious part of stirring this malt-water with flour over a super-low flame for several hours until it thickens and caramelizes. I wouldn't say the flavor is amazing, but considering the only ingredients are wheat and water it's sweeter and more complex than I'd have imagined.

Sholeh zard | Saffron pudding | Recipe

This ancient dessert is so important to Perisan culture that it's the first of many dozens in the Food of Life cookbook — continuing our metaphor, maybe it's like the apple pie of Iran. It's a fascinating blend of a classic peasant technique for stretching food — simple rice cooked in a lot of water to make it more filling — with some of the most expensive ingredients like saffron and cardamom, making it at once comforting and exotic. A healthy dose of rosewater helps make it special for ceremonies and holidays, the butter makes it stick to your ribs and banish any possibly remaining hunger, and the cinnamon and nut decoration makes a feast for the eyes, too. This dish was super tasty and just about all of the enormous batch was eaten, but keep in mind it takes a long time to cool so make it well in advance of serving.

Bereshtook-e nokhodchi | Chickpea cookies | Recipes (though I'd use butter/ghee rather than oil)

This turned out to be really similar to the burfi I made for the India meal, shortbread-like, semi-sweet, lightly oily squares. Whereas with the Indian version the butteriness came from ground cashews so the dairy was dry milk, in the Persian version it's the chickpea flour that's dry, and ghee brings the moist fat. In both cases it's little more than mixing with powdered sugar (with a splash of rosewater to make it indelibly Iranian), rolling it out, and cutting it up. Easy, and tasty.