I decided to start this blog because let’s face it as new generations get older culture and preservation of family recipes and methods become harder to preserve.  We want it all, health, ease of preparation, variety, and most importantly something that tastes delicious.  Being a full time employee, having a social life, maintaining fitness, and being able to cook meals that fit into all of this can sometimes be challenging.  On top of all of this eating Persian Food when that’s all you grew up eating is even more appealing but sometimes not as much for the waistline.  So I decided it was time to come up with a new generation guide to being healthy, being time efficient, and still preserving those delicious Persian delicacies I grew up on but with a new American feel, Persian Fusion.

But first the backstory, growing up in Springfield, Illinois wasn’t always the easiest of endeavors.  I grew up with an older sister and two parents who had never once given us PB and J for a meal.  In fact, I don’t even think they knew what that cultural staple even was.  Before my sister and I entered school my mom was a stay at home wife and would go to school herself at nights but would always make sure to cook full Persian dishes for us for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  We were truly spoiled when it came to eating to our hearts content.  After my mom started working and we entered school she would still try to make us Persian dishes for every meal.  I remember taking a Persian dish into a lunchroom full of American children and having them looking at me like it was the oddest thing they had ever seen.  I grew up in an area where there were basically 3 or 4 Persian families and that was it.  It often became difficult to mesh the realities of how I grew up into the culture we were learning to integrate ourselves in.  So as I began to get older I started a sort of rebellion against certain Persian dishes.  It wasn’t cool to take a green rice dish with kidney beans and an odd smell to a lunchroom full of kids eating hamburgers and pizzas.  So my mom would sort of begin giving in and let us take the bologna sandwiches or corn dogs to school.  It wasn’t until my freshmen year of college that I started to realize how lucky we were to have a mom who would cook us these unique dishes that other people had never had.  I would take the things my mom would make to my friends and they would love it.  I guess times had changed but so had my outlook on food.  I began to appreciate the intricacy that was put into each dish and the amazing flavor it really had in comparison to the foods I had been eating.  From there I began exploring my own interpretations of these recipes my mom would give me.  I would call her and ask her to make something and she would say I don’t have any measurements and just give me the ingredients and I would try it and try it again until I came up with something close.  Eventually I took those ideas even further and incorporated things I had learned through fitness research and passion for healthy living into the same recipes.  My mom and I began collaborating more and she realized herself how much we both actually had this desire to cook our traditional foods in a healthier modified way.  We would call each other and say oh I tried this or that and it turned out so good.  Along the way my mom and dad had my other sibling who I will never forget my mom feeding Persian food and telling him it was Chinese stir fry so he would eat it.  He thought Persian food growing up was gross but my mom would make modifications to the foods by adding Shrimp or something and saying oh it’s American.  As he has entered college and moved on in his life I see those same attitude adjustments to foods that I once was emulated happening for him.  The appreciation for these cultural foods has grown and for myself has become a platform for pushing new ideas and interpretations of the foods we all grew up on and love.

Why would anyone care about some girl who likes to cook and writes a blog?  Well the answer is you don’t.  But for a majority of us who grew up in homes where culture was a dichotomy between American and Persian (in my case) appreciating our foundations in food anatomy and exploring our fascination with Westernized foods is a territory yet to be explored thoroughly.  I feel like I can help many of us see that Persian food isn’t weird or unusual for children even at an early age.  We can give our kids whether American, Persian, Asian or any culture a nice Persian American meal and not make them feel uneasiness in exploring something unfamiliar.  There’s a saying “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” we have a similar sense when it comes to feeling a foods familiarity and not feeling like we are eating something unusual especially at an early age.   The goal of my little blog is just to allow us to all take our foods we love and grew up on and explore a new Westernized modern method for cooking the same things.  Join me as I explore Persian American Food Fusion!

Bon Appétit