Persian Rice

Fari Farzad was a class act without even trying. She was tall and self-possessed, her dark eyes observant and warm. She did things calmly, with a minimum of fuss. She dressed in simple clothes, well-cut and of good cloth. She was beautiful; her son, who took after her, modeled for Armani for a while.

We became friends after I got to know her husband, Bahman, who was one of my photography teachers in the early ‘90s. By then, our native countries, America and Iran, had been at odds with each other for almost half a century; but Fari and Bahman and I talked more about photography and culture and family than politics. 

Their daughter babysat our daughter. I edited Bahman’s book about light measurement. I loved going to their house. The family was close-knit, the hospitality gracious. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Fari set a platter of Persian rice on the table: it looked like a round, single-layer cake, the “icing” a crispy golden crust, the rice within fluffy, the grains separate instead of stuck together in a gluey mass. The crust, called tahdig, is considered a delicacy, and Fari always made sure I got plenty of it. She loved that I loved her cooking.

After my family moved to a city a few hours away, we kept in touch with phone calls and visits, but as the years went by we drifted apart. Bahman unexpectedly passed away in 2016. Fari followed the next year. As my husband and I drove to Birmingham for her service, I was devastated, having learned only a few days before that she had been suffering from ALS.

~ ~ ~

My husband and I are in a supper club with five other couples. We take turns hosting, and the host, who prepares the main dish, picks the cuisine. It’s almost always international, the idea being to try new food and learn new cooking skills. When the hosts decide to ring in 2020 with Iranian food, I volunteer to make Persian rice. 

I want to remember Fari by making something she made for her family and friends. I regret that I never asked her to show me how. I regret that we drifted apart. She was on my mind for weeks before she died, and I kept thinking of calling her, and I regret that I didn’t.

I watch video after video on YouTube, surprised to find so many Iranian men making rice. But I’m looking for a recipe—though Persian rice is more of a technique than a recipe—that I imagine to be like Fari’s was. It has to be simple, elegant, unfussy. I end up cobbling instructions from two videos together.

My husband helps me make the rice. I weep as I grind the saffron in the small marble mortar Fari gave me after her first trip back to Iran. The cooking technique is so different from what I’m used to, I worry that I won’t be able to get that delicious golden crust. As I go through the steps, I remember that Fari always covered the pot with a cloth before putting on the lid. I feel like I’m getting to know her, and her culture, in a way I haven’t before. Persian rice is slow food. I tell myself to be patient. If I can bring forth a bit of Fari’s calm, I’ll get some kind of crust.

It’s getting late, so I put the pot in a box and set it on the stove as soon as my husband and I arrive at the host’s house. A young Iranian woman is among the guests that evening; she suggests I turn up the flame a bit. About ten minutes later, I can tell by the aroma that the rice is done. Holding our breath, the young woman and I turn the pot onto a platter. The crust is a crispy golden brown. She tells me that my tahdig came out better than hers ever has. I tell her it’s not mine. It’s Fari’s.

Fari’s Persian Rice

Ingredients

½ c. boiling water

¼ tsp. saffron (2 pinches)

2 ½ c. basmati rice

Enough water to cover the rice 

1 T. salt

Directions

Grind saffron with a mortar in a small pestle if you have one. (If not, don’t worry about it.)

Add saffron to the ½ cup of boiling water.

Set aside for about 10 minutes.

Combine rice, salt, and enough water to cover the rice by about an inch in a large non-stick pot. 

Bring to a boil, cover, and keep boiling for 6 minutes. (This is called parboiling!)

Drain rice in a sieve, and rinse well with cold water.

Melt 2 T. butter with 4 T. olive or grapeseed oil.

Add it to the saffron water and mix well.

Pour ¼ of saffron mixture into the bottom of the pot. (This makes the tahdig.)

Then add a layer of rice and pour some saffron mixture over it. (It won’t cover the whole layer.)

Repeat until rice and saffron mixture are finished.

Make several holes in the rice with the handle of a wooden spoon. (This allows steam to escape.)

Cover with 2 or 3 paper towels, then put the lid on. (The towels absorb the steam.)

Cook for 15 minutes on Med-Low if your burner runs hot, Med if it doesn’t.

Then reduce to Low and cook for an hour. 

Turn the rice onto a platter.

This is delicious with roasted chicken and vegetables. 

“Praesent id libero id metus varius consectetur ac eget diam. Nulla felis nunc, consequat laoreet lacus id.”

— Pablo

The Unlived Life

Most of us have an unlived life, maybe several: the path not followed, the risk not taken, the love who got away.

Bell Rock and Cathedral Butte, Sedona, Arizona

It’s been said that if you go to red rock country in Arizona three times, you’ll end up moving there. And indeed, as my husband and I hiked mountains and mesas that seemed to emit (rather than simply be) various shades of copper, we started imagining ourselves in the Sedona area for the rest of our lives. The air in northern Arizona sits lightly on the skin; it isn’t weighed down by humidity. Without trees, the vistas are endless. From Mescal Mountain, you can see Cathedral Rock miles away. 

We met a couple on the trail who moved to Sedona from Indianapolis two years earlier. The guy said he’d lost thirty pounds just by hiking. My husband and I looked at each other. We too could hike our way back to our former svelte selves!

“New places and people change us in ways we can’t anticipate.”

He would finally take up carpentry (though there’s a glaring lack of wood in Arizona). I’d release myself from the grueling search for a publisher. I’d learn to read Tarot cards, and my spot-on readings would help people get clarity about their lives. My business would boom! As my husband and I wound around the precipitous side of Mescal Mountain, I mentally decorated my office: it would be a Zenlike space without the typical beaded curtains, scented candles, and paisley bedspreads adorning the walls. I would never drape myself in bracelets and scarves. Instead, I would—
 
The popular HGTV show “House Hunters” popped into my mind. Whenever people tour houses that appeal to them, they always say, “I can see myself here.” They’re trying on different houses for size; in Sedona, my husband and I were trying on a different geography for size, a geography we fantasized would mold us into our ideal selves.
 
I do this every time I travel. When I joined the Peace Corps and left for Africa, I imagined I would become a health-care super-hero . (I didn't.) At various times in my life, I’ve imagined myself as a scholar in an ivory tower in Boston, as a devoted yogi at an ashram in Pennsylvania, as a successful woman of letters living in a cozy flat in London. In each scenario, I appear as a better version of myself. 
 
Two truths hold: 1) Wherever we go, there we are, and 2) where we go changes us. 
 
Geography, climate, culture, and relationships matter. If I hadn’t lived in Africa, what would my life look like now? Would I be a wife? A mother? Photographer? Writer? The equation is muddy. New places and people change us in ways we can’t anticipate. They bring forth different aspects of the self, but they can’t bring forth something that isn’t already there. Dormant perhaps, but there.

Within hours of arriving home, my husband and I knew we wouldn't be moving to Arizona, as compelling as it was. We’ve already moved several times, so we realize we’re no more likely to make drastic changes in our habits in Arizona than we are in Tennessee. And here, we have a beautiful if not perfect geography, enough culture to feed us, and friends we love and who love us. But the next time we travel, we’ll once again imagine living an alternate life far from home.
 
If you could move anywhere, where would it be? What aspects of yourself would that place bring out? What keeps you where you are? 

Hiking with friends at Big Soddy Creek outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee

Starting a supper club

I’ve been thinking about the fast-forward lives we lead, driven by the need to do, do, do. Sometimes friends get lost in the shuffle of our responsibilities—family, work, health, and the general maintenance of life. 

My husband and I’ve belonged to a supper club for a few years. There are twelve of us, and we get together once a month, taking turns hosting. Sometimes only eight of us show up, sometimes all twelve. The point is, we schedule a time to bond over food. 

A small but lively party

Since two of us are vegetarian and one is allergic to seafood, we make vegetarian meals without fish. To challenge ourselves, we cook international. The host picks the cuisine. Among others, we’ve done Colombian and Russian, Syrian and Thai, French and Native American. The host prepares the main dish, and everyone else brings appetizers, soup, salad, a side, and dessert. 

About to dig in

 Our most recent meal together was German. (It turns out that Berlin, which makes me think of bratwurst, has been named not only the vegetarian, but the vegan capital of the world.) The hosts really got into the Oktoberfest theme, decorating with beer steins, trumpets, and dried leaves. For entertainment, the musician in the group coaxed us into singing a German tune in rounds of three. We didn’t get very far but we had fun.

Still life with trumpet

Eating in a restaurant from another culture gets your toe in the door to that culture, but making the food yourself gets your whole foot in. A meringue or souffle—that tricky combination of sweet or savory ingredients with just the right amount of egg white and air—is uniquely French. A Thai spring roll, so innocent in a restaurant, requires a feat of manual dexterity. Knafeh, a Syrian dessert that looks like a bird nest with pistachio eggs, is the most difficult dish I’ve ever assembled—also one of the most delicious. As I struggled with it alone in my kitchen, I thought of the long line of women who have passed the skill to their daughters, making the delicacy together until the girls can do it in one hour instead of four. 

Carol and me

If starting a supper club seems like a good idea, who would you like to be in it? How often would you meet? What kind of food would you make? Trying new food is a lot of fun—even more so when doing it with friends.

Finding your tribe

Whatever you make, whether it’s as ephemeral as music or as physical as furniture, it’s a lot more fun when you belong to a group that encourages you, helps you solve problems, and critiques your projects. You become friends and your work improves.

My writing group is called the Radish Farm, a name that comes from a New Yorker’s interpretation of a Southerner’s pronunciation of the Writers’ Forum. There are four of us, and we adopted the name because it conjures up an image of a root vegetable unusual for its spiciness, and because we can call ourselves the Rads. 

At a recent conference outside of Nashville

If you’re thinking of getting a group together, it helps to know what others do. But you have to make the process your own, depending on the craft you practice, the personalities involved, and the culture you live in. This is what we do: several days before our monthly meeting, we email our fellow Rads the pages we’ve been working on. This gives us time to read each other’s work (sometimes more than once) and write down our thoughts. We also think about how to frame our feedback so the person receiving it can best take it in.

Writing is a solitary business, so we meet in each other’s homes. We hang out, have a glass of wine and a few appetizers, then sit down to dinner. The host makes the main course, and the others bring sides. All this goes on between 6 and 7 p.m. Then we move to the living room. 

We each get thirty minutes of feedback—ten minutes from each of the other Rads. It helps to time this, but we don’t spaz out about it. One person might comment for four minutes, another for fourteen. What’s key is this: the person receiving the feedback doesn’t defend or explain her pages, which would slow down the process and interfere with her own listening. 

After all the feedback has been given, then the writer whose work is being critiqued gets to talk, usually to clarify her intentions and ask questions about the feedback. The “critics” can also to respond to each other’s comments—as in “I agree with what you said about this, but not about that, and here’s why.”

This process takes a lot of trust. We know and care about each other’s projects. We get invested. We talk about what works as well as what doesn’t. We get specific. We want our feedback to be actionable, but we don’t insist that it be acted on. It’s the other person’s book, after all.

Sometimes we go out for dinner and just hang out. We’ve traveled to writing conferences, and we’ve created our own retreats. We have tiffs every now and then, but we talk them out and move on. We email each other between meetings. We help each other make our writing stronger. 

What do you love making? Who helps you make it better and have more fun doing it? If you don’t have a group, what can you do to find your tribe or create one?

How would I get help?

Most of us have a few days—not just hours, but days—etched in memory. They don’t follow the usual routine. They start out one way and end up another.

When I was living in a small village in West Africa, I often got lonely. One day I got really lonely, so I rode my motorbike through the bush to visit a friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer. Her nickname was Anna Banana, and like me, she lived in a village where nothing much was happening. We decided to ride our motorbikes to a bigger village that had a market. If we didn’t find any excitement there, at least we could buy some fish for dinner.

Off we went. The empty dirt road was corrugated from the rains and dusty from the heat. I had to clench the handlebars to keep the front wheel of my bike straight. We were riding side by side, but when a bush-taxi came barreling toward us, she pulled ahead to give it wide berth. I squeezed my eyes shut to keep out the dust as the taxi thundered past, and when I opened them, my friend was sprawled out in the road, her motorbike several feet away.
 
I stopped and ran over to her. How would I get help if her neck was broken? The road was empty, the closest village miles away. I couldn’t leave her alone, and it would be dangerous to move her. We would have to wait for another vehicle. It might take minutes, it might take hours. 

She sat up. I sank down beside her, limp with relief. She’d broken her finger, not her neck. 
 
I hid her motorbike in the bush. Gingerly, we rode mine back to her village, cleaned up her scrapes, and waited by the side of the road for a bush-taxi to deliver us to the Peace Corps nurse in the capital. The nurse decided the finger should be x-rayed, so she dispatched us to the hospital, where we ran into one of Anna Banana’s friends, a Polish doctor who not only expedited the x-ray, but invited us to dinner at his place that evening.
 
Once the x-ray confirmed that the finger in question was indeed broken, the Peace Corps nurse medevacked my friend to a neighboring country to have it properly set. I was going to return to my village, but Anna Banana urged me to stay in town. “Go to dinner. Adam’s a good cook, and his friend—the other Polish doctor I told you about—will be there. It’s been a rough day. Have some fun.”
 
So I stayed over with friends. I got a shower, borrowed a dress, and went to the Polish doctor’s house in my least flattering colors: olive and chartreuse. I met the other Polish doctor. They wined me and dined me and made me laugh. I not only had fun, I met the man I eventually married. That was forty years ago this week.

A few months after we met, hanging out on the beach. This was toward the end of 1979.

Who knew? How do you ever know? You wake up one morning feeling lonely, go visit a friend, and by evening you've met the love of your life. There’s such a long chain of events leading up to it. Maybe you decide to join the Peace Corps; maybe he decides to slip through the Iron Curtain. Maybe you can’t get the job you want here, and he can’t get the job he wants there, so you each end up somewhere else, perhaps somewhere far from home. You’re lonely, he’s lonely. You meet, and soon you’re inseparable.

Sometimes it seems impossible that out of the billions of people in the world, this is the one you met and married and are spending your life with. What chain of events brought you together? Was it as chance or was it fate?

A phone call from Africa

When I returned home from West Africa, I was glad to be back but I also felt sad, thinking that I would never again get to talk to the friends I’d made in the village where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer. There were no phones there, much less an internet. To receive mail, you had to have an address in the capital, and even then letters could take anywhere from two weeks to three months to arrive. Now that I was home, I was cut off from the people I’d been living among for the past two years.

Today, almost forty years later, my cell phone lit up as I sat down to write. It was Neneh Jallow calling from The Gambia, courtesy of Facebook Messenger. I picked up, and the line was unusually clear and free of delays. I was speaking to the little girl, now a woman, who used to come over to my house to do her homework and play with my cat. Neneh and her parents had a battered old tom who earned his keep as a mouser, not as a beloved household pet. She took after her quiet, observant father and didn’t get easily excited, but the first time she saw my kitten wiggle and leap to catch the piece of string I was dangling, she burst into peals of laughter. Whenever she came to my house after that, she cuddled and played with my pet.

Neneh is in her mid-forties now. A community-health nurse, she began her education in the village, in a one-room, mud-brick schoolhouse. A wife and the mother of four, she works as a community health nurse in the capital. She cared for her mother, Chimban, one of the best friends I’ve ever had, in the last difficult years of her life. Chimban kept telling Neneh she would never get to hear my voice again, so last year Neneh called me up on Facebook Messenger for the first time. Chimban didn’t speak English, and my Wolof had grown rusty, but we were able to say everything that mattered—that we missed each other, that we’d always remember each other. She called me by my African name. “Ehhh, Sainabou,” she kept saying, words that took me back to who I was decades before. 

Facebook and other social media platforms have gotten a lot of flak lately. They’re monopolies that need to be broken up. Cannibals harvesting our data. So driven by advertising that they won’t get serious about monitoring hate speech, misinformation, and Russian interference in our elections. This may all be true, but stop and think about the people you’ve loved and lost—not because anything was wrong but because life moved on. You’ve probably reconnected with some of them on social media. If not for this amazing invention (and the ones it’s built on) the friends you found might have been lost completely. 

Who have you searched out from your past? Who was the hardest to find? What was the most surprising outcome? If there’s someone you’d like to reconnect with but haven’t, I recommend doing it. Maybe like me, you’ll not only affirm a bond, but also reconnect with a part of yourself.