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    Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets
    Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets
    Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets
    Ebook662 pages19 hours

    Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets

    By Najmieh Batmanglij

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    About this ebook

    Najmieh Batmanglij was exiled from Iran 40 years ago. She was living in France where she did not speak the language or have proper documents—and above all, she was pregnant. Out of a nostalgia and yearning to connect with her roots, she wrote her first cookbook, Food of Life, as a kind of love letter to her children. She wanted to share with them all the good things she had experienced growing up in a traditional family in Iran.
     
    Over the years, Food of Life has been called “the definitive book on Persian cooking” by the Los Angeles Times and “the Persian cookbook Bible” by Iranians and others. Food of Life was followed by six more cookbooks including Silk Road Cooking, which according to the New York Times, read like “a good novel—once you start it’s hard to put down.” But as she worked on these books at home in America, a fantastical dream took hold—a craving to revisit Iran and celebrate the specialties and traditional dishes of each region.
     
    The challenges that faced her—emotional, political, and logistical—were daunting, but she felt she had to do it. She knew from her Silk Road research trip to China twenty years earlier that, under the bulldozer of modernity, Iran too would soon lose many of its traditional ways, special cooking techniques, and small artisanal workshops. Najmieh was determined to capture and preserve them before that happened.
     
    After five years of overcoming obstacles, meticulous planning, and ten thousand miles of traveling the length and breadth of Iran—cooking with local cooks, visiting workshops, and developing recipes—Najmieh’s dream has been realized with the creation of Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets. This book is a distillation of those past five years. It is an authoritative exploration of a cuisine whose cultural roots are among the deepest of any in the world.
     
    Najmieh takes us with her on an extraordinary culinary journey: from the daily fish market in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf, where she and her host buy and cook a 14-pound grouper in a tamarind, cilantro, and garlic sauce, to the heart of historical Isfahan, in central Iran, where she prepares lamb necks in a yogurt, saffron, and candied orange peel sauce topped with caramelized barberries. Traveling north to the Caspian Sea, she introduces us to the authentic Gilaki version of slow-cooked duck in a pomegranate and walnut sauce, served over smoked rice; and the unique flavors of a duck-egg omelet with smoked eggplant and baby garlic. Lingering in the north, in tribal Kurdistan, she treats us to lamb-and-bulgur meatballs filled with caramelized onions and raisins in a saffron sauce. Dropping south, to Bandar Abbas on the coast, she teases our palate with rice cooked in date juice and served with spicy fish, while in Baluchistan she cooks spiced goat in a pit overnight and celebrates the age-old method of making bread in hot ashes.
     
    At every village and off-the-beaten-track community, Najmieh unearths traditional recipes and makes surprising new discoveries, giving us a glimpse along the way of the places where many of the ingredients for the recipes are grown. She treks through the fields and orchards of Iran, showing us saffron being picked in Khorasan and pomegranates in Yazd, dates harvested by the Persian Gulf, pistachios in Kerman, and tea and rice by the Caspian.
     
    With more than 250 recipes and 450 photographs,  this updated edition of Cooking in Iran is packed with inspiring ideas and practical tips—everything you’ll need for recreating these glorious dishes so that you can embark on a culinary journey of your own.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMage Publishers Inc.
    Release dateJun 24, 2022
    ISBN9781949445350
    Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets
    Author

    Najmieh Batmanglij

    Najmieh Batmanglij, is an acclaimed chef, best-selling cookbook author, and cooking instructor. She is also the co-founder and executive chef of the award winning Persian restaurant Joon, in Vienna Virginia. Najmieh was hailed as “one of seven immigrant women who changed the way americans eat” by The New York Times, and The Grande Dame of Iranian Cooking by Mayukh Sen in The Washington Post. Her latest book Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes & Kitchen Secrets, was the culmination of tens of thousands of miles of travel through Iran. It was chosen as one of the best cookbooks of 2018, and called “magisterial” by The New York Times. Batmanglij views preparing a meal not only as a culinary experience, but also as a means to bring family and friends together. She encourages her readers to use her books as she was taught in Iran, to cook, to laugh, to tell jokes and stories, to recite poetry, and to enjoy the meal. Over the past 40 years, Batmanglij’s books have acted as a both a beacon and a bible to Iranian-American and mixed-ethnicity families in the English-speaking world. Her life and her work meet at the vortex of feminism, tradition, ceremony, and the nourishment of body and mind, proving that none of these concepts need be foreign to one another.

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    • 5/5
      I was very intrigued to find different Persian foods that come from different areas in Iran. I'm excited to try out the authentic Iranian recipes in this book.

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