Three meals, more or less. It all came out very well and according to plan. (I added a fried mozzarella to the serving of the ricotta dumplings, just because I had a nice low-moisture block of mozzarella that needed using up.)
If you want to know where I basically developed a cook-crush on Baraghani, it’s in his instruction for putting lemon juice into the hot green tahini for the carrots. “Just squeeze the lemons by hand,” he says, “and catch any seeds as they fall.” This is pretty much exactly as I have done for years—I can’t be bothered by juicing lemons or limes with great precision unless what I’m doing requires a LOT of juice. Two lemons in a tahini preparation? Squeeze ‘em by hand. But this is the first time I’ve read a cookbook and seen the author saying “yeah, that’s the way to do it”. I feel seen, in a good way.
Sometimes on Top Chef and other fancy cooking shows, they’ll knock “rustic preparation”—uneven cuts, torn food, lemons squeezed by hand. I get the point of very even cuts to food in a cookery sense—it’s about making sure things cook evenly. But I kind of love the look of food where the vegetables don’t look industrial or overly precise, where the meat is sliced roughly, where it doesn’t feel like a Culinary Institute of America graduate parsed everything out just so for the sake of precise portioning. This book is very very on that wavelength. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve really instantly taken to a cookbook without reservations.