An Iranian Stew to Celebrate Ramadan

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An Iranian Stew to Celebrate Ramadan

Good morning. It’s the new moon today and with it the start of

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, one of Islam’s holiest months. We have

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for suhoor, iftar and, for planning purposes, the Eid al-Fitr holiday that will come at the end of March. To all those observing: Ramadan Mubarak.

Naz Deravian has a new recipe for an iftar meal:

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(above), an Iranian stew of lamb and split peas topped with crispy onions. “Khoresh” is a Persian word for stews or braises; “gheymeh” refers to the size of the pieces of meat — small, almost minced. Spiced with turmeric, cinnamon and saffron, sweet with onion, rich with tomato paste and finished with either dried lime or a healthy pour of lime juice, it’s a dish I commend even to those who aren’t really sure what iftar is (it’s the meal eaten after a day of fasting). Serve over rice with a

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.

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I don’t observe Ramadan, so Saturday’s going to be similar to most Saturdays I’ve ridden through of late: a breakfast of a single, precious

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doused in soy sauce, with a toasted English muffin slathered in cold butter and marmalade, followed by a long drive through distant neighborhoods looking for

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. (I invariably end up at

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in Brooklyn for a Nicky Special or a Princess, depending on mood.)

For dinner?

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, into which I generally stir some baby spinach for a flash of green. That’s an excellent meal.

Sundays are for

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, for

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, for starting the day with a little feast that can extend toward noon with mugs of strong, milky ****** tea and a graze through the print edition of The New York Times.

I’ll take a nap for lunch and then get going in the afternoon with preparations for a proper Sunday supper with family: a simple

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, with

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,

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and a bowl of frozen peas cooked through with sweet butter and just a little mint.

Unless, that is, family bags out on me — there’s a bowling tournament no one reminded the old man about; a date with friends, same.

If that’s the case, I’ll upshift into experimentation mode and keep playing with this recipe for steamed tofu with a garlicky ******-bean sauce that I’ve been hacking out of Calvin Eng’s new cookbook, “

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.” It’s pretty cool. You steam slabs of silken tofu (silken tofu’s delicate, and my slabs generally turn out as chunks) and then serve them over rice, doused in a gravy of garlic and ******-bean sauce mixed with a handful of seared ground beef or pork.

Eng makes his own ******-bean sauce from scratch, but I’ve done well with store-bought Lee **** Kee mixed with a little hoisin sauce, maple syrup and chicken stock. Make your rice, get the ground pork sizzling as soon as the tofu goes into the steam bath, add the sauce and stir to combine. You’ll have dinner on the table 10 minutes later. Don’t forget to scatter some sliced scallions over the top.

There are thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on

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If you run into issues with your account, please write for help: *****@*****.tld. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me if you want to get something off your chest or simply to say hi: *****@*****.tld. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get.

Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with cakes or ale, but my old boss Dean Baquet put me onto Dan Chaon’s fourth novel, “Sleepwalk,” published in 2022. It’s lawless, funny, really, really dark.

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#Iranian #Stew #Celebrate #Ramadan

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