Iran - the Food

Its Friday, its time to go back to Iran!

This Friday, next Friday and then again for one more week, I will take you back to Iran where I spent the most wonderful vacation ever back in October this year. Todays post is all about fooooood :) 

The first thing you notice when you go to Iran is that you will not find any tables anywhere. There are carpets all over the houses, but not tables. I loved that! When its time to eat people just take a tablecloth (stupid to call it tablecloth in this context), put it on the carpet and sit down all around the tablecloth. 

We had the most amazing food in Iran! Already prior to our arrival our friend told everyone that we are vegan (everyone means everyone who invited us to dinner - we had dinner in a different house almost every night) so whereever we went, we got delicious vegan food. For every meal people eat a very thin kind of bread. When its good, its very soft and delicous, when its a little old, its completly dry and hard and not that good ;) 

We also had salad for every meal. Mostly just made with cucumber and tomatoe but sometimes also with onion, cabbage, carrots and lettuce. For most meals we also had olives in all different varities and figs (soooo good! We brought a whole lot home with us). A meal is usually taking quite some time and its very nice just to sit and snack on bread, salad, olives and figs :)

We also had rice basically every day. There is this thing with rice in Iran - when cooking it, they put some potatoe slices on the bottom of the pot and leave them there, while the rice is cooking so that they get somehow burned and very crunchy. When eating, everyone is fighting about this crust since its perceived as the most delicious part of the meal :)

Another thing I found very intersting was that the herbs (thyme, rosmary, basil, etc.) where not used for cooking and they were not part of the salad but they were just put on a plate and eaten in between two bites. Like a whole stem of thyme or rosmary! It was somehow strange to me but also very good! And so healthy!

Concerning the dishes we had, we had loads of eggplant and zuccini, mushrooms in all varieties, beans and lentils, okra, some greens I didnt know (and I dont think you can find them in Germany) and most of this in a kind of tomatoe-curry sauce. We had rice with safron, fried raisins, bread filled with mashed potatoes, small spicy bell peppers, falafel etc. etc. etc. seriously it was gerat! In Germany when someone invites you for dinner and you say that you are vegan, many people will find it very difficult to cook something for you and they will maybe complain that you are a complicated guest. In Iran it was not at all like this! Everyone was happy to cook something vegan for us and they also found it easy to cook (they mainly made dishes that are usually eaten with meat but they left out the meat - easy :)), sometimes they were surprised how good a dish tasted when using e.g. mushrooms instead of meat and two of our friends actually are vegetarians now! They felt so good after two weeks of eating vegan only with us that they decided to stop eating meat!

Next to all the great food we had for lunch and dinner, we also had endless tea breaks. Whereever we went, we haf some tea and some dates or figs. I loved those small breaks, where we just sat down on a carpet, the little one just next to us (she loved that we were always sitting on the floor!) and relaxed for a few moments, drank tea and talked about this and that. When we went somewhere by car and there was a place with a beautiful view, we stopped, got the carpet from the trunk, sat down and had a glass of tea while enjoying the view. It was just wonderful! 
We also had loads of fruits. Since we travelled in Kurdistan it was easy and cheap to get fruit everywhere. Kurdistan is the region of Iran where all the veggies and fruits for the entire country are grown - like the apples, I worte about in my last post about Iran.

I hope you all had a wonderful week so far and I wish you a most amazing weekend! 
Sending much love!