Spice up your Salads

A Persian meal is always served with some fresh vegetables be it in a salad or a dish of sabzi khordan or both. Fresh vegetables are essential for vitamins and minerals which help prevent illness and have many other benefits such as an aid to our digestive system, skin, hair and bones but salad’s can become a little boring unless you spice them up. A perfect way to add flavour is through the use of herbs.

One of my favorite herbs is mint and it makes for a perfect salad dressing.  Mint is easy to grow and you can grow it all year around and it’s easily sourced in a dry form from any supermarket.  This recipe below is one I use regularly and completely transforms even the most basic of salads into some something delicious.

• 4 desert spoons of olive oil
• 1 desert spoon of grape vinegar or apple vinegar ( these are gluten-free. Malt vinegar contains gluten)
• A teaspoon of fresh or dried mint finely chopped
• A teaspoon of fresh flat leaved parsley finely chopped
• salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Take your basic salad ingredients and cut into mouth size pieces.

2. Your dressing ingredients: Olive oil, Apple vinegar, salt and pepper, mint and parsley.

3. Chop the ingredients

4. Add the chopped parsley and mint to the basic salad ingredients

5.Take the olive oil, vinegar and salt and pepper and whisk with a fork and then pour over the salad.

Nothing could be easier and you have yourself a tasty, zingy salad.

Nooshi joonet . Enjoy

Advieh Spices used in Persian Cooking

If you ask anyone who has never eaten Persian food before they always imagine  that it’s  heavily spiced, a lot like Indian food! And then they’re always surprised to learn it isn’t!

Persian cooking  is made with a delicate balance of sweet and sour, hot and cold and the flavours are subtle and memorable. Quite unlike most other middle eastern food, Persian cuisine has a flavour all of its own. Often we take a recipe and ‘Persianise’ it, like Spaghetti ! We add what we think it lacks to create a better balance, or a taste that we prefer.

The ingredients of Persian food are largely the same ingredients that food all over the world is made from  and yet when we  add spice to a recipe,  it literally transforms it.  In Persian cooking we use fruits, herbs, flowers and ground roots to create a delicate aroma and a rich flavour. Each spice has a purpose and is helpful in maintaining a healthy mind, body and soul.

Here I’ve put together a list of the spices used in Persian cooking. Food is always created with the intention of making  a hot or cold meal and we use spices to help create healthy and delicious food.

ADVIEH

• Persian advieh is a blend of 5  or more different spices.  Although similar to Gharam Masala, the emphasise is less on a  hot flavour. Advieh can be bought from Iranian (and Indian)  grocery stores already made up but it’s great to make it yourself to your own individual taste.  There are different blends of Advieh depending on what you’re cooking, where you come from in Iran and personal taste . There’s one for rice dishes, which tends to be more fragrant and is sprinkled on the rice just before serving,  another for khoreshts, which would usually include limu amani and zaafaran  and another for pickles which would consist of spicy and sour flavours.  The first five on the list are the usual spices used but if you want a spicier flavour add black pepper and cloves. Anything goes really ! For an Advieh basic recipe  use equal parts of the following, try using one teaspoon to start with.
• Cardamom seeds
• Coriander seeds
• Cumin
• Cinnamon
• Dried rose petals
• Star of Anise
  
• Nutmeg
• Limu amani
• Angelica
• Black pepper
• Turmeric
• Ginger
• Cloves
• sesame seeds
• Zaafaran
• Pistachio

Simply take your spices of choice, grind with a pestle and mortar and store in an airtight container in a cool dark cupboard.