We cooked today.
Literally.
It was Simon's birthday! He was turning 20, and we wanted to host Jeff for dinner, so we did a huge feast thing. Simon said he didn't want anything special for his b-day, so we said, "Amazing. We'll just decorate the house and also invite Jeff (environmental history and policy prof) and also do a seven course meal for the Persian equinox, also known as Nowruz." Simon said, "Perfect, sounds great, I'll help cook."
The menu:
Senjed (dried oleaster): love and compassion - we made charcuterie for this; didn't have oleaster, so olives were a very close substitute
Seer (garlic): health, medicine, self-care - we made bruschetta, which was quite garlic-y and delish
Somaq (sumac): color of the sunrise, the triumph of good over evil - cuke salad with feta, sumac, lemon, garlic, s+p; topped with crushed red pepper and fresh mint
Serkeh (vinegar): patience, wisdom, aging - fish and chips were attempted. chips were consumed. need i say more?
Sabzeh (lentil sprouts): rebirth and growth - our lentils were of the unsprouted variety, but we made dal, which was so so good. I think it may have been the favorite real dish of the night...
Seeb (apple): beauty, heath, vitality - apple cake with brown butter cinnamon cream cheese frosting (mostly sour, not too sweet), pictured below as Simon blows the candles out
Samanoo (sweet wheat sprout pudding): affluence, strength, fertility - shockingly, we couldn't find germinated wheat sprouts— or pre-germinated wheat sprouts— so we made a thoughtful substitute of rice pudding! It was theoretically going to be brown rice so it was nutty, but we only had jasmine rice. And I put so much cinnamon... yum. And there was caramel on top! I also made that, so it was the hard + sticky kind, and I had softened it before serving, but it got really hard really fast because the pudding was cold...
We started around 8:30 this morning, or as Capt. Allison would say, 0830. The first step was to brown the butter, because I wanted it to set before making the frosting (foreshadowing). We did a bunch of other prep so that there would be less to do later which was mostly dessert stuff. I baked the cakes, Simon chopped one million very juicy tomatoes for the bruschetta, and the butter browned. When it was done, I poured it into the bowl and was looking for a spot in the fridge. We went shopping pretty recently, so the fridge was quite full (foreshadowing). I poured the freshly browned butter in a nice glass bowl (foreshadowing), and put it on one of the open door shelves in the fridge (so much foreshadowing, ohmygod).
Probably two hours later, I was eating a little lunchy snack, and I opened the fridge. The bowl had inched towards the edge of the shelf, dangerously close to falling off (do you get what's about to happen?). I pushed it back, naive to the world.
Not even two minutes later... CRASH! The delightful glass bowl filled with delicious browned butter was now on the floor, all intermingled shard-wise. Tragic.
We made more.
Don't worry.
The rest of the cooking went pretty seamlessly. Again, shoutout to the dal I made, it was fire. Very tasty
Lowkey, the fish might have been bad too... the votes were pretty even across the spread as loosely demonstrated here:
"For the record, the fish was definitely bad." - Lyra
"This is just what tilapia tastes like" - Sophie
"I couldn't even choke it down. It might be poison." - Simon (fish chef)
"It's normal." - Natalie
Pictures to prove it happened:
Simon's b-day and Lyra singing.
