I don’t usually try cooking anything that requires more than 3 ingredients and 20 minutes of my time. Luckily I didn’t have to this weekend as Jennifer did most of the work, including taking most of the pictures to make it look like I was cooking.
This is Ghormeh Sabzi which is apparently one of the more difficult Persian dishes to cook. All in all we spent 5 hours preparing and then cooking the stew, rice and preparing mast o khiar (Persian cucumber yogurt.) It is hands down my favorite dish, so important wikipedia tells me it’s the Iranian national dish.
The recipe was a combination of these two Ghormeh Sabzi recipes on the internet, the first is a Boston Globe recipe from a Boston area Persian restaurant, the second is from this cooking blog. We doubled most of the greens because we didn’t think it looked like enough. we’d visited the farmers market and had bags of everything we needed.
Mast o khiar recipes (cucumber yogurt) are plentiful on the internet. As are recipes for Persian style Basmati rice, which we only allowed to soak for 30 minutes. Still don’t know how to make tahdig. The dish in pictures below with the final product first.
Wonderful at the end, closest I’ve had to home cooked Ghormeh Sabzi which my mom cooks.
All of the herbs that would eventually get cut and dices into the stew.
The slow arduous task of preparing the herbs for cooking.
Chop Chop Chop Chop
Lots of chopping, I only stood in for this picture.
Most of the work was done by the master chef.
Brown onions and dry out herbs and greens.
I did wash the meat.
Cuts of lamb, beautiful lamb
Adding Turmeric and lamb to the onions. Beautiful color and smell.
Dried lemons with holes are key to the flavor.
Everything together to create the stew with 3 cups of water, more added later.
Stewing
Mast O Khiar (Persian cucumber yogurt)
Rice pan with half a stick of butter and saffron.
The end product
