Persian Food is Weird
I’ve only recently begun to realize how “weird” my family’s food habits are. I actually got the idea to write this tonight when I was googling recipes; I stumbled across some blog entry where things I thought were tasty were being used as examples of “exotic fear-factor food”. Granted, I grew up thinking salty fermented yogurt was a perfectly acceptable summertime drink. So there is that.
In any case, this isn’t a recipe post, just felt like mentioning the “weird food” of my past 24 hours. Last night it was almost 11pm when my parents & I met each other at home, & we were all too tired to cook (oh, eating supper at 11 is also “weird,” I guess, but not terribly abnormal for us). Our fallback meal for just such occassions consists of: watermelon, paneer (feta, basically) cheese, hot flat bread, and ridiculously sweet hot tea. You make watermelon cheese rollup wrap thingies, no cooking required. If we don’t have watermelon we use havidge morraba instead, which is carrot marmalade — also mentioned in that “fear factor” discussion. I always thought watermelon paired well with cheese, and carrots made great marmalade, and all of the above went really well with hot tea. Oh, and actually our tea here is pretty good, and sort of recipe-worthy: 2 parts loose gulabi baruti to 1 part loose Twining’s earl grey, a splash of rosewater in the pot. Serve extra-strong with hard sugar cubes on the side.
Tonight I made chili, which is boring and not recipe-worthy either. Desert was vanilla ice cream-carrot juice-cardamom milkshakes, though. So there is that.
