Baraghani’s The Cook You Want To Be continues to be one of my favorite books to work with—I’ve been ambling my way through, looking for recipes I haven’t tried yet.
“Mom’s Salmon” got picked this time, though it’s not much like any dish I can remember my mother cooking. We didn’t eat fish that often when I was growing up because only my father and I really liked it—I would often make a point of ordering it when we went out as a family. I particularly liked fish cooked on a grill. I remember having grilled tuna for the first time as a teenager when visiting my aunt on Long Island and I was astonished—this is the same thing that we get in cans? How can that be? Anyway, the basic simple gimmick of “Mom’s Salmon” is that it’s lemony and is served over greens. (Baraghani recommends chard, I used collards.) Very simple, very good, and I put it alongside some roasted potatoes. I’m still the person who likes fish the most in my household, but everybody put up with it, at least. (Good thing too, because the leftovers are in play tonight.)
I decided next to tackle another Baraghani dish, something I’d been meaning to make for years, which was tahdig, the famous Iranian/Persian rice dish. I’ve had it before when eating out a few times but never gotten round to making it.
I’m generally very fond of browned, crusty starches of various kinds, and there’s lots of other rice-eating cuisines where crisped or crunchy rice is prized, though it’s not always browned. Okoge in Japanese food, when I’ve had it (from my own cooking or others) is usually just kind of crispy-crunchy rather than browned. Whereas tahdig is really supposed to have a big brown crust all around and be served basically like a pie, with the crust on the top, unbroken if you can manage it. Baraghani’s version has a mixture of saffron water, yogurt and neutral oil going into the pan first, parboiled rice going in on top of it in a kind of mound, with about a 30 minute cook and then an inversion of the pot, with the hope that the whole thing will come out onto a plate intact.
Mine did not. I’m pretty clear why that was the case: I used a thick-bottomed Creuset pot that was both too deep and too thick. Next time I think I might use a cast iron skillet. (I don’t keep the teflon type of no-stick pans around.) There will be a next time—I might actually take another shot at it this coming weekend.
Anyway, it tasted good. I served it with a salad of mint, tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, lime and avocado and a roasted lamb sausage.
For the last night of our upper-90sF heat, I was in the mood for something room-temperature, so I made peanut-butter soba noodles (and forgot to put cucumbers in them as I’d planned) along with some scallion pancakes. Here I was working off another favorite cookbook, Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok, which is just generally a good guide to a lot of East Asian-inspired regular dishes. His scallion pancake technique is good: simple flour-and-boiled water dough, rolled out thin and brushed with sesame oil, rolled up into a spiral, rolled out again, scallions thrown down on top, rolled up and rolled out again. I just made a quick dip sauce that was heavy on premade chile-and-garlic paste and there we were.