Mrs. Shopkeeper is from Southend, right. You know: long pier, cockles, Kiss me Quick hats and, well, candy floss. Unnaturally coloured sticky stuff that dissolves when you touch it, blows away in the sea breeze and seriously messes with you hair if you are daft enough to get yourself entangled therein. So when Mr. Shopkeeper [...]
Ketcheree: A Recipe for Good Friday
Kedgeree. Y’all know what this is, right? Rice, with boiled eggs and smoked haddock. Traditional Friday/Easter/breakfast fare. Especially appropriate on Good Friday. You may also know that it originated in colonial India. But what a lot of people don’t know is that authentic kitcheree (or ketcheree in Afghanistan) is just rice and mung beans (or [...]
Persepolis Party Food #343: Mushy Pea Houmous
Fish and chips and mushy peas. Doesn’t get much more British than that. Unless…you do it the Persepolis way. If you too would sooner eat your party hat rather than face another array of supermarket party rubbish, this is a pretty easy platter of slightly different festive fare. Make pitta bread chips by heating pitta [...]
Hirino me Kolokassi: Pork with Kolokassi
Well it’s not often that we get to write about pork in the course of our Middle Eastern rantings. For this we have of course made Cyprus an honorary member of the region. Kolokassi crops up in Veggiestan, wherein we have featured two recipes for this underrated vegetable: one for kolokassi chips with skordalia, and [...]
The Persepolis Ingredient Clinic #4: Sour Grapes
Yup – these really are sour grapes. Cheek-suckingly, eye-wateringly sour. They even look mean, no? This, basically, is verjuice’s (verjus, for all you francophones out there) Mummy. The real deal. In Iran sour grapes are known as ghooreh, and verjuice as ab ghooreh, and they are a really important part of the cuisine. The season [...]
Mother-in-Law’s Recipe for Tas Kebab
Tas kebab is one of those funny recipes that rumbles around the kitchens of the Middle East with no-one quite knowing whence it came. It is a popular and homely dish in countries from Bulgaria all the way round to the Levant, with a small detour to Iran. Even the name is a puzzle: although [...]
The Persepolis Top Five Things to Rub on Your Turkey…
Our handy cut out and keep guide to better basting. We all know that there are umpteen ways to stuff a turkey. But you can generate an equally appreciative chorus of oohs and aahs if you rub the skin of your bird with the right herbs and spices. And turkey does need all the help [...]
