Fesenjoon – Chicken (or eggplant) with Walnuts and Pomegranates recipe and cookbook review: The Saffron Tales by Yasmin Khan

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I flipped through The Saffron Tales, pasting little post-it notes on all the recipes I wanted to try. So many. She had four different variations on tahdig for her Chelow. Have you tried it? Chelow is Persian rice, and tahdig is the crispy layer that cooks in olive oil and butter right against the pan. So good. It’s one of those things that makes lovely manners rather difficult. I flagged all of them, and went back to flipping through the book. Then I saw it – Chelow filled with all sorts of herbs. When we lived in New York, my friend Firoozeh and I would take turns hosting family dinners on weekends, and that’s the rice she always used to spoil us with. Since we’ve moved to Texas, there are about 1600 miles between us. This isn’t a Firoozeh hug, but its as close as I can get without a plane ticket, so I had to make that one. It was perfect. Warm fuzzies all around.